Diamond Monroe is twenty years old, broke, and tired of negotiating the price of her body with men who wouldn't negotiate the price of their lunch. After three years in the life on the streets of New Orleans, she gets on a Greyhound to New York City with $2,200, a duffel bag, and no plan.
New York doesn't care. The money disappears. The jobs don't come. And Diamond finds herself back on the clock ? only this time she's working the hotel bars near Wall Street, where the clients wear suits that cost more than her rent and talk about money like it's a religion.
Then one of them gets drunk and starts confessing. Not about his wife. About the stock market. About buying the dip. About compound interest. About turning ten thousand dollars into eighty thousand by doing the one thing Diamond has been doing her entire life: being patient.
She starts listening. Then writing it down. Then studying. Then investing. Five hundred dollars becomes a thousand. A thousand becomes ten. And the girl who learned P/E ratios from pillow talk and diversification from a woman at a laundromat begins building something no one ever told her she could have ? a portfolio, a future, and a way out that doesn't cost her pieces of herself.
DIAMOND is street lit meets financial literacy ? a raw, funny, unflinching novel about a woman who was never supposed to learn the language of money, and what happens when she speaks it fluently. Hidden inside a story you can't put down is a complete education on investing, from opening your first brokerage account to understanding compound interest, told by a voice that makes Wall Street sound like the block ? because it is.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people ? the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.