A certain sort of male novelist will always aspire to be Joseph Conrad. The seedy cosmopolitanism of his fiction and its worldly, morally compromised protagonists — those European merchant seamen negotiating far-flung colonies — are an attractive counterpoint to the unmanly business of staying indoors to write a book.

Toby Vieira’s entertaining, globe-hopping debut tale of diamond smugglers wears its debt to the great man on its sleeve notes.