The Lady Sherlock Series in Order

The Sherlock Holmes premise is not a gimmick here. Charlotte's problem is structural: she is unmistakably clever in a society with no market for it, and the fiction of Sherlock is the only container that lets her be paid. Every book tests that arrangement a little harder.

The Lady Sherlock books in order

1. A Study in Scarlet Women (2016) — Charlotte engineers her own scandal to escape marriage, and lands in a poisoning case that touches her own family. Establishes the Sherlock fiction, Mrs Watson, and Lord Ingram.
2. Charlotte Holmes and the Locked Box (2017) — A short story sitting between the first two novels. Slight, but it fills a gap in the household's early arrangements.
3. A Conspiracy in Belgravia (2017) — A missing man, a half-brother Charlotte did not know she had, and the first appearance of the shadow that hangs over the rest of the series.
4. The Hollow of Fear (2018) — A body in an icehouse on Lord Ingram's estate and a suspect nobody wants it to be. The series' turning point and the book that changes the central relationship.
5. The Art of Theft (2019) — A heist rather than a murder, in France, with the widest cast so far. The lightest instalment and a deliberate breather.
6. Murder on Cold Street (2020) — Inspector Treadles, arrested standing over two bodies. Confined, tense and the most conventional detective novel of the eight.
7. Miss Moriarty, I Presume? (2021) — Charlotte is engaged by the one client she cannot refuse and cannot trust. The confrontation the previous five books have been circling.
8. A Tempest at Sea (2023) — A locked-room murder on an ocean liner, with Charlotte in hiding and unable to use her own name.
9. A Ruse of Shadows (2024) — The most recent published novel, and the one that pays off the longest-running arc in the series.

A ninth novel, The Vanished Sister, is announced for late September 2026 — not yet published. Eight is the current count.

You cannot read these out of order

Most historical mystery series let you start anywhere. This one does not. Two continuing arcs run underneath the cases — Charlotte's relationship with Lord Ingram, and the slow approach of Moriarty — and both develop in a straight line with real consequences carried between books.

There is also a practical matter: Charlotte's household, her sisters' circumstances and her own legal position all change across the series. A reader dropping in at book six meets an arrangement that took five novels to build and gets no explanation of it.

Is it a romance?

It is a mystery series with one of the slowest-burning romances in the genre attached. Sherry Thomas came from historical romance — the Fitzhugh Trilogy is hers — and the Charlotte and Ingram relationship is built with a romance writer's patience across years of plot.

Readers who want the romance resolved quickly will be frustrated. Readers who enjoy watching two people who cannot say anything directly conduct an entire relationship in subtext will find very little to match it.

What to read next

Veronica Speedwell is the closest neighbour — Victorian, funny, and with its own long-running romantic tension. For Thomas's romance work, see the Sherry Thomas reading order, and for Victorian romance without the corpses, the Belles of London.