A Gift of Diamonds

Orphaned with his cousin, Janice, after their moonshining families were massacred by bootleggers on an isolated lake in Central Florida in 1951, Jake Longmire, though highly intelligent, didn't enter school until the third grade.

Destined for failure, Jake was rescued by a former Paris war correspondent who had survived four years of Nazi concentration camps. Reclusive Leila Kincade took Jake and Janice into the antebellum sanitarium she had refurbished into a home. But Leila, carried secrets no one should have to bear. When Leila killed her eccentric brother her dark secrets finally tumbled out. After helping Leila hide the body in a limestone cave on his old family property, Jake pieced together clues from Florida's Civil War history to determine the fabled Lost Confederate Gold from Richmond was probably hidden in the same cave. But finding traces of the gold raised more problems than it solved.