The Mesmerist's Apprentice

Description

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.