Paperbacks: The Mesmerist, by Barbara Ewing
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Your support makes all the difference.Mesmerism was all the rage in 19th-century London, and in her fourth novel Barbara Ewing imagines life for a female practitioner in this very male world.
Cordelia Preston is an ageing actress who, fed up with being typecast as an old crone, sets up shop as a hypnotist in a Bloomsbury basement. A natural at the art of suggestion, she’s at the height of her powers when she is implicated in a series of unsolved murders. A compelling storyteller, Ewing puts on a masterly performance in recreating Victorian theatreland. Even when the body count starts to mount, she keeps us believing in an increasingly unlikely train of events.
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