Look away now, gentle reader, if you are squeamish about dead bodies, embalming, or anything to do with the business of being a funeral director.
Challinor, based in New Zealand, writes evocatively of Sydney in the 1870s, particularly about Crowe Funerals, run by Tatty Crowe, 24, herself a widow. The author brings to life the slums of Chippendale and Newtown, the city’s cemeteries, and some of the grander houses of Sydney at that time.
This is the second novel in this series, after Black Silk & Sympathy, with a third promised for 2026. Challinor is already the author of 18 bestselling novels as well as non-fiction and a young adult novel. While it is not essential to have read the first in this ‘Black Silk’ series, there is tantalising information in this book about how and why Tatty became a widow.
Her character runs a popular, compassionate and successful funeral service, but she becomes increasingly concerned about the bodies of dead babies left on her doorstep as well as in other parts of Sydney.
She is also concerned about the deaths of many women after backstreet abortions, and rumours of ‘baby farms’ where unscrupulous people are paid to look after babies, but kill them instead.
Tatty Crowe has faithful staff, all of whom live on her premises, and it is when she is teaching some new members of staff their duties that the descriptions become really interesting … if rather graphic.
While Tatty investigates abortions and baby farms, determined to save lives and bring perpetrators to justice, Challinor has provided fascinating information at the end of the novel about 1800s contraception, abortion and even baby farming, noting that it was not until 2019 that abortion was finally decriminalised in NSW, and in 2020 in New Zealand.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah Challinor is an award-winning and consistently best-selling author of eighteen historical fiction novels, a young adult novel, and two works of non-fiction about the Vietnam War. In 1999 she completed a Ph.D. in history at Waikato University, for which she won a New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association Military History Scholarship in 1996. She was recognised as a Distinguished Alumni at Waikato University in 2017, and in 2018 she became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and historical research.
In the past Deborah has written an opinion column and feature articles for the Waikato Times, edited special publications and books, and taught New Zealand history, and researching and writing historical fiction, at university level for several years. These days she writes fulltime and her books are sold in New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Russia and Czechoslovakia, and in eBook, audio and large print formats.
Deborah was born and raised in Huntly and attended Huntly College. She believes the best music came out of the 1960s and ’70s (with some exceptions), reads a lot, loves cats, mourning jewellery and taxidermy, and follows the New Zealand Warriors (Up the Wahs!). But most of all, she loves history.
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