It’s a tale steeped in deceit, greed, suspense, murder and international intrigue.

“Really, it started almost four years ago,” Jerry Jaeger, co-founder of Hagadone Hospitality Co., told The Press.

Jaeger’s world travels, love of the thriller genre and insatiable curiosity set the course for the author to pen his third book, “Red Diamond Justice,” which will be released Monday.

A seed of that curiosity was planted in Jaeger’s mind with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 aboard a Boeing 777 in 2014, one of the most mysterious and expensive searches for a missing aircraft in aviation history.

“My first thought was to do the story on that fateful flight,” Jaeger said.

As he commenced research, he realized it would be too painful for the families of those lost on that flight to recount a true story that to this day has no real closure.

Still enrapt with the mystery behind that flight gone wrong, Jaeger shifted his focus to create a work of fiction that would include massive airliners, but in a different way: diamond smuggling. He said something just tweaked in his brain when he was researching Malaysia Airlines.

“It was just the idea of, ‘What could happen in such an event?'” Jaeger said. “Boeing 777s are fascinating. And it was how they were transporting the diamonds all around the triangle.”

The diamond triangle in “Red Diamond Justice” is mapped to points in Africa, Russia and Australia.

“The world’s…