L. M. JACKSON – The Mesmerist’s Apprentice. Arrow Books, UK, paperback reprint, May 2009. Hardcover edition: William Heinemann, UK, May, 2008. No US edition.

   This is the second in a series featuring Sarah Tanner, an enterprising Victorian businesswoman and amateur sleuth, first introduced in A Most Dangerous Woman (2007).

   Mrs. Tanner (as she is known in the London neighborhood where she runs Sarah Tanner’s New Dining and Coffee House) has reopened her establishment after a disastrous fire the preceding year.

   She’s attractive, soft-spoken, and not well known in Saffron Hill, where her aloofness (which is taken for an air of mystery by the gossips) makes her the object of some suspicion.

   When a gang of thieving boys begins to target Sarah’s shop and the near-by butcher’s, she begins a discreet inquiry that convinces her that something more significant than random thieving is involved.

   In the midst of this trouble, a letter arrives from her former lover, now married, asking for her help. She hesitates but eventually meets with him and learns that he is concerned that his mother is being victimized by a nurse who is taking care of her husband in the wake of a disabling stroke that has left him unresponsive.

   When Sarah reluctantly agrees to look into the matter and determine what the nurse’s motives may be, she soon discovers a network of crimes that involves the thieving band whose forays have turned more violent and a mesmerist under whose influence the nurse appears to be working.

   Sarah Tanner is a resourceful investigator who moves easily among the various strata of London society, from the most humble to the aristocratic circle to which her former lover belongs. Her affair with her former lover Arthur DeSalie is revived, but if the investigation may resolve some difficulties, Sarah’s estrangement from her past, momentarily resolved, may not be so easily settled.

   Jackson (who also writes under the name Lee Jackson) has written other books set in Victorian London, a setting in which he and his characters seem perfectly at home. Sarah Tanner is a worthy addition to the roster of female sleuths and the novel’s conclusion suggests that she will return to deal with both old and new concerns.

Bibliographic Data:   In spite of Walter’s closing comment, there appears so far to have been only the two books in the Sarah Tanner series. As by Lee Jackson, the author has written four earlier historical mysteries:

    • London Dust (2003)

The Inspector Decimus Webb, 1870s London series —

    • A Metropolitan Murder (2004)
    • The Welfare of the Dead (2005)

    • The Last Pleasure Garden (2006)

   None of the above has had a US edition, and it is a mystery as to why that should be. Books of similar themes and settings have been gobbled up eagerly on this side of the Atlantic.

   Also by Lee Jackson is The Diary of a Murderer, another Victorian murder mystery novel, but it’s available only online and on Kindle.