As if a head for busi­ness and a nose for trou­ble aren’t enough to dis­tin­guish fierce­ly inde­pen­dent Lavinia Lake from the oth­er women of Lon­don’s fash­ion­able Clare­mont Lane, there is one more fea­ture to set her apart. Lavinia is also well versed in the prac­tice of mes­merism, an extra­or­di­nary gift that far sur­pass­es mere charm and phys­i­cal appeal. Nobody knows this bet­ter than the usu­al­ly cool­head­ed Tobias March, who seems to have fall­en hope­less­ly under her spell. For­tu­nate­ly for all, how­ev­er, Lavinia uses her pow­ers for good. And ever since a tragedy involv­ing one of her sub­jects, she has even retired them in favor of her work with Lake and March, a joint ven­ture pro­vid­ing “discreet pri­vate inquiries for indi­vid­u­als of quality.”

Mrs. Lake and Mr. March have a rocky first encounter: he is sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ram­pag­ing through the tiny shop Mrs. Lake and her niece oper­ate, all in an attempt to force them to leave and thus remove them from impend­ing dan­ger. Nev­er­the­less, they find rea­sons to con­tin­ue their rela­tion­ship, despite the fric­tion of their equal­ly strong per­son­al­i­ties. As these are romance nov­els, their rela­tion­ship also con­tin­ues to be fraught with unre­solved passion.

Part of that pas­sion and that fric­tion is due to the fact that Mrs. Lake is a tal­ent­ed mes­merist, although Mr. March is quite hes­i­tant to allow him­self to be placed under her mag­net­ic influ­ence for med­i­c­i­nal pur­pos­es, even though he is quick­ly falling under her cap­ti­vat­ing spell as much as she is falling under his. How­ev­er, in her new occu­pa­tion per­form­ing pri­vate inquiries, Mrs. Lake finds his com­pa­ny and her mes­mer­ic pow­ers advan­ta­geous, and not always in the expect­ed manner.