If there is such a thing as a poet's thriller, Tobias Hill's new novel, ''The Love of Stones,'' is that. Lapidary in both style and subject, the book follows the history of a spectacular medieval jewel and the people who are consumed by the desire to have it.

Tobias Hill successfully finesses the ending, where wish-fulfilment demands that Katharine should hold in her hand the jewel for which she has given up so much, while sophistication prefers a dilution of triumph. What is confounding about The Love of Stones is not the occasional failure but an almost continuous success. It may be that the book, like Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, is as close to the apotheosis of a yarn as to a literary masterpiece, but it deserves the many readers it will win.

Throughout the book, Hill relays the suspense of every meeting involving these ill-fated stones, and the filmic moment of disclosure - the box opening - is just as thrilling each time. But this paradoxically rambling and clean-cut novel would have benefited from fewer characters and less striving. For every successful character (such as Frau von Gott, the eccentric German collector and Sterne's mother figure), there is a superfluous one: the Dickensian sewer child, Martha, is a grubby-faced stereotype, a "please mister" delinquent whose dealings with the jewel seem little more than a closing device.