About the Series & World

The World of Tarot & Tea Leaves

Bloomsbury, London. 1856.

Clara Wetherly runs Hawthorne & Wetherly, the apothecary shop her grandmother Genevieve built — and where Genevieve’s ghost still rearranges the tarot cards when she has something to say.

Clara makes remedies, reads tea leaves, and would very much like to stop finding dead bodies. But the dead keep turning up, and Inspector Graham Redgrave keeps turning up with them — tall, skeptical, infuriatingly observant, and carrying secrets of his own beneath that black greatcoat with the silver buttons.

Between them sits Marmalade, Clara’s orange tabby, who has his own opinions about every suspect, every constable, and every kipper that enters the shop. Readers will tell you he’s the real detective. He would not disagree.

And watching it all from behind the lavender-scented curtain — Genevieve, who saved lives with foxglove, faced down earls, and is now quietly, stubbornly, orchestrating everything from beyond the grave.

About the Author

There is a shop on Bellrose Lane in Bloomsbury where the tea is always warm, the cat is always watching, and someone in the neighborhood has almost certainly just been murdered.

Zia Bellamy writes the Tarot & Tea Leaves Mysteries — a Victorian cozy mystery series set in 1850s London, where a sharp-witted herbalist, a too-perceptive inspector, and a sixteen-pound orange tabby named Marmalade solve crimes that Scotland Yard would rather they left alone.

Her books are filled with the things she loves most: cobblestoned streets slick with rain, apothecary shelves lined with glass jars, friendships forged over strong tea and stronger opinions, slow-burn tension that builds across the entire series, and a ghost who absolutely refuses to stop meddling.

If you’ve ever wanted to curl up inside a Victorian mystery and never come out — welcome to Hawthorne & Wetherly. The kettle’s on.