Tatty Crowe Books in Order

The Tatty Crowe series grows out of Deborah Challinor’s fascination with cemeteries, mourning jewellery and Victorian funeral customs. It follows Tatiana, known as Tatty, Crowe, a determined young woman who becomes Sydney’s first female undertaker in the 1860s and discovers that dealing with the dead often means risking her life among the living.

In Black Silk and Sympathy Tatty is a seventeen year old Londoner left destitute after the sudden deaths of her beloved parents. She emigrates to Sydney in 1864, determined to make a secure living, and ends up apprenticed to Crowe Funeral Services under enigmatic undertaker Titus Crowe. The work involves everything from laying out bodies in front rooms to organising plumed horse drawn processions and learning the new craft of embalming. When Titus dies and Tatty inherits the business, rival funeral director Elias Nuttall accuses her of poisoning her husband, forcing her to investigate him while fighting for her reputation in a deeply conservative, male dominated trade.

The book revels in the textures of Victorian death culture – black silk gowns, ostrich feathered hearses, mourning stationery and the practical business of keeping bodies presentable in a hot climate – without losing sight of grief, poverty and class. Tatty herself is stubborn, curious and compassionate, which means she keeps noticing patterns and injustices other people prefer to ignore.

Black Silk and Buried Secrets moves the timeline into the early 1870s, with Tatty now a twenty five year old widow running a busy undertaking firm. As she works, she realises an alarming number of local women are dying from illegal abortions. When tragedy strikes close to home and rumours of baby farming surface, Tatty starts asking questions that lead her through the slums of Chippendale and Newtown, up to the grand houses of Woolloomooloo and into Sydney’s criminal courts. Old enemies reappear, new ones emerge and the series leans more firmly into historical crime.

In the forthcoming Black Velvet and Vengeance Tatty’s world widens again. A trip to Auckland to embalm the body of a client’s father goes terribly wrong, leaving her shaken and facing hard choices about the future. Back in Sydney, bodies begin vanishing from funeral trains on their way to the cemetery, suggesting that someone with a personal grudge is targeting both her business and the people she cares about. Tatty’s mix of professional skill and dogged loyalty will be tested more than ever.

Across the Tatty Crowe novels you can expect richly drawn funerals, back lane investigations and a heroine who never quite fits the role society sets out for her. The tone balances dark subject matter with flashes of humour and a strong sense of friendship among staff, neighbours and clients. It is as much about how communities handle death as it is about solving particular crimes.