Miss Sarah Tolerance ran away with her brother's fencing master when she was sixteen. Now he's dead and she's back in England, and a Fallen Woman. But she refuses to follow the Fallen Women who have gone before her and become a courtesan. Sarah is a straight shooter, with her pistol as well as her wit, and her mind is as sharp as the blade of her sword. She's clever and discreet—she has reinvented herself as a private investigator. Miss Tolerance is an Agent of Inquiry, the sole one of her kind in London in this year of 1810, with mad King George III on the throne and Queen Charlotte acting as Regent. Sarah's position in society allows her to float between social layers, unearth secrets, find things that were lost, and lose things too dangerous to be kept. An agent of the Earl of Versellion has asked her to find a fan that the Earl's father gifted to a lady with brown eyes. When Sarah discovers the secret of the fan, both she and the Earl are targeted by ruthless killers. They realize the fan has a second secret, one that will affect the fate of England itself, and they must decipher it. Sarah's life is getting more and more complicated-and she's growing closer and closer to the Earl. To save England and herself, she must decide whether to be guided by her heart... or her conscience.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Fallen Woman of good family must, soon or late, descend to whoredom. Miss Sarah Tolerance refuses to follow the path of the Fallen Women who have gone before her. She's a straight shooter, with her pistol as well as her wit, and her mind is as sharp as the blade of her sword. Miss Tolerance is an Agent of Inquiry, a private investigator of sorts—the sole one of her kind in London, in this year of 1810 with mad King George III on the throne and Queen Charlotte acting as his Regent. Her aim was to trace lost trinkets, send wastrel husbands back to their wives, and occasionally provide protection to persons with more money than sense—but she is continually drawn into the plots of others. Her newest case poses a puzzle unlike any she has faced who killed the Chevalier d'Aubigny? The French émigré was beaten to death in his own bed, found by his retainers the next morning, all the doors and windows of the house sealed tight. The murder is a classic locked-room mystery, but Miss Tolerance knows she can find the key. As Miss Tolerance examines the situation and interviews witnesses and suspects, she realizes things are far more complicated than she originally suspected—for the Chevalier had more enemies than he had friends, and Miss Tolerance is hard pressed to find someone who didn't wish him dead. Her search for his killer takes her from the lowest brothels of the seedy London underworld, where men go to indulge their more aggressive desires, to the Royal Family and a Duke who must hide his perversions or risk the Throne. Welcome to Miss Tolerance's Regency London, where nothing is what it seems and the only way to serve justice is to follow conscience rather than law.

The Sleeping Partner heralds the return of the serene and self-reliant Miss Sarah Tolerance, Fallen Woman and Agent of Inquiry. This time, Miss Tolerance is seeking not a missing trinket or the solution to a crime, but a living person - a young gentlewoman who has vanished from under her wealthy family's roof, apparently bent on a scandalous elopement with a mysterious man whom nobody knows. Her elder sister is desperate to find and forgive her - and Sarah, haunted by the similarities between this girl's story and her own, is determined to assist - but with nothing to go on but a false name and a small sketched portrait, the case is proving her most difficult yet. As the search intensifies, Miss Tolerance must adversaries who will stop at nothing to keep her from finding the girl. And, more than she had ever expected, the mystery surrounding this young woman so like and yet so unlike herself forces Miss Tolerance to confront the voices of her own past, and to question what her future may hold. Reviews: At the outset of Robins' entertaining third mystery set in Regency London (after 2004's Petty Treason), an upper-class lady using the pseudonym "Mrs. Brown" calls on Sarah Tolerance, a freelance "agent of inquiry" whom society deems a fallen woman because she eloped at 16 with her brother's fencing tutor. Mrs. Brown wants Sarah's help in locating her 16-year-old sister, Evadne, who has eloped, unwilling to remain in their father's house under his "harsh rule." Sarah, struck by the similarities between Evadne's situation and her own at the same age, searches for the missing girl in London's underworld, where she discovers connections to her own family and to a wider war-profiteering scandal. Colorful characters like Sarah's brothel-keeping Aunt Thea, cameos by such real-life personages as Mary Wollstonecraft, and the slow-burning romance between the quick-witted Sarah and close friend Sir Walter Mandiff all add to the fun. - Publishers Weekly