Which Wilkie Collins novel features a stolen yellow diamond?

The Wilkie Collins novel featuring a stolen yellow diamond is The Moonstone. Published in 1868, it follows the disappearance of a valuable Indian diamond after Rachel Verinder receives it for her eighteenth birthday.

The stone was taken from India by Colonel John Herncastle, who acquired it through theft and murder during the Siege of Seringapatam. He leaves it to Rachel, unintentionally exposing her household to the diamond’s hereditary guardians, three Hindu priests determined to recover it.

The Moonstone is also an important landmark in detective fiction. Its investigation involves Sergeant Cuff, conflicting witness accounts, hidden evidence, and multiple narrators, including the servant Gabriel Betteredge. A common mix-up is treating the Moonstone as the semi-precious mineral of the same name; in Collins’s novel, it is a diamond associated with the Hindu god Chandra. The book was serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round.