Sarah Tanner Books

â It was said that she had the good manners of a respectable upper servant but was far too young to have been pensioned; that she spoke as if she had received an education, but knew the costersâ slang as if she were born-and-bred to it; and that she not only had no husband â which was a commonplace on Leather Lane â but seemed never to have possessed one.â When the mysterious Sarah Tanner opens her Dining and Coffee Rooms on the corner of Leather Lane and Liquorpond Street, her arrival amongst the poor market-traders creates a stir. Few doubt that she has a past, but no one can possibly predict how it will return to haunt her. When an old friend is brutally murdered by the unlikeliest of assailants, Sarah Tanner is the only witness. Unable to turn to the police, she reluctantly finds herself drawn back into the dark underworld of the Victorian metropolis. Assisted by unlikely friends, dogged by the criminal machinations of the greatest gamester, felon, villain, swindler, and scoundrel in London, she must unravel a web of treachery and deceit that takes her from the gaming hells of Regent Street to the suburban heights of Upper Holloway, from the slums of St. Giles to the fast-flowing waters of the Thames. Relying on her wits and trading on her past, Sarah Tanner risks gambling her own life upon a desperate quest for justice and vengeance.

When the enigmatic Sarah Tanner re-opens her Dining and Coffee Rooms soon after a disastrous fire, the gossips of Leather Lane grudgingly admit she has â the luck of the devil.â Yet when a local butcher is falsely accused of a heinous offence â selling horsemeat â it seems her luck has run out. Drawn into an evermore dangerous series of confrontations with a gang of youths who seem determined to put an innocent man out of business, Sarah Tannerâ s own livelihood looks set for ruin into the bargain. But what links the persecution of a humble butcher with a certain Dr. Stead â a leading practitioner of the strange art of mesmerism â and a desperate plea from Sarahâ s former lover, the aristocrat Arthur De Salle? As Sarah Tanner investigates, she increasingly fears that the mesmerist, patronized by the highest society, is a charlatan and his latest patient, the unwitting victim of a grotesque fraud. To preserve a familyâ s honour, Sarah sets out upon a trail of suicide, murder, deception and deceit stretching from the alleys of Leather Lane to the drawing rooms of Mayfair.