The Dain Curse (Heathen Edition)

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an American author widely recognized as the trailblazer of hard-boiled detective fiction with his unsentimental, breakneck storytelling chock-full of fast-paced, slangy dialogue and abrupt, explosive violence. Following hot on the heels of his 1929 debut novel Red Harvest, Hammett published his sophomore shoot-'em-up The Dain Curse that same year, wherein his Continental Op is on the bizarre case of a San Francisco diamond heist that stinks of an inside job and whose prime suspect is Gabrielle Dain-Leggett: a young, wealthy socialite with a taste for morphine and religious cults, believed to be suffering from the curse of the mad Dains, and who has a tragic effect on everyone around her - they die violently.