Anna Elliott writes her mysteries with Charles Veley, and between them they have produced one of the largest continuous cozy-mystery runs in print: fifty-two books across three connected series, all of them historical, all of them clean, and all of them anchored to the same fictional family. If you have arrived here from Amazon you may know the main series as the Sherlock and Lucy Mysteries; on the books themselves it is A Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery, and that is the name we use below.
The premise is simple and does a lot of work. Sherlock Holmes has a daughter. Lucy James is an American stage actress who discovers her parentage in the third book, joins the Baker Street operation, and by the middle of the run is carrying the investigations herself, with Watson, Mycroft, Inspector Gregson and a small army of Baker Street Irregulars around her. The two spin-off series follow those Irregulars — Becky and Flynn — into the First World War, and then a separate cast into the Second.
Here is every book in order, with what each one is actually about.
Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mysteries in Order
Thirty-six books, published between 2014 and 2024, running from 1895 to 1902 in story time. The numbering below is the authors’ own, as listed on Amazon. The mysteries are self-contained, but Lucy’s history, her mother, her marriage and the Baker Street household all develop straight through, so reading forward matters more here than in most long cozy series.
#1 — The Last Moriarty · May 2015
The one that starts everything. London, 1895: Holmes takes on the protection of an American railroad magnate ahead of a delicate Anglo-American summit, and an American stage actress named Lucy James walks into his life carrying a claim on his own past. View on Amazon →
#2 — The Wilhelm Conspiracy · October 2016
A prototype weapon disappears at Dover in 1896 and the chase runs through European spas and royal courts with the Kaiser's agents always a step ahead. Lucy invites herself along; Watson is dragged after her. Tesla and the future Edward VII turn up en route. View on Amazon →
#3 — Remember, Remember · April 2017
An American actress wakes on the pavement outside the British Museum with no memory and a single name in her head — Sherlock Holmes. If you would rather not begin with Veley's solo-flavoured first two, this is the natural entry point. View on Amazon →
#4 — The Crown Jewel Mystery · June 2017
A short case. Lucy walks into the Capital and Counties Bank chasing a thread from her own history and straight into a robbery in progress — while Holmes, unknown to her, is working the same building. View on Amazon →
#5 — The Jubilee Problem · September 2017
London, 1897, dressed head to toe for Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Behind the bunting an assassination plot is taking shape, and the warning comes from an unlikely direction. View on Amazon →
#6 — Death at the Diogenes Club · November 2017
A locked-room murder inside the Diogenes Club, the most silent and most rigorously male institution in London. Lucy cannot get through the door, which is precisely the difficulty. View on Amazon →
#7 — The Return of the Ripper · June 2018
Lucy's wedding is weeks away when a killer begins staging crimes in the Ripper's manner and takes a personal interest in the bride. The stakes here are domestic as much as criminal. View on Amazon →
#8 — Die Again, Mr. Holmes · January 2019
A gang lord on trial, a vanished stash of stolen opium, and then Holmes himself disappears. Lucy and Watson work the case without him and against a very patient enemy. View on Amazon →
#9 — Flynn's Christmas · December 2018
A Christmas short starring Flynn of the Baker Street Irregulars, loose in the snowbound streets and, inevitably, in over his head. View on Amazon →
#10 — The Clown on the High Wire · June 2019
A clown is found hanging dead from the high wire at the Olympia Amphitheatre with a full house watching. The circus closes ranks; Holmes and Lucy have to take it apart from the inside. View on Amazon →
#11 — The Cobra in the Monkey Cage · July 2019
A cobra escapes at the London Zoo, kills a rhesus monkey and empties the keepers' nerves — and Watson, who happens to be there, realises the snake is the least of it. View on Amazon →
#12 — A Fancy-Dress Death · September 2019
Flynn talks his way into a duchess's costume ball to help a friend in trouble, and finds the masquerade is covering something considerably worse than gatecrashing. View on Amazon →
#13 — The Sons of Helios · October 2019
A bankrupt aristocrat's one remaining asset, a priceless painting, vanishes from his crumbling house, and the owner is too absorbed in his sun-worshipping rituals to be much help. Then two men are found dead on the premises. View on Amazon →
#14 — The Vanishing Medium · October 2019
A former client fears her wealthy aunt has fallen under the influence of a fraudulent medium. Lucy dismantles Madame Yolanda's act in a single evening — and then the case turns lethal. View on Amazon →
#15 — Christmas at Baskerville Hall · November 2019
Christmas on the moor: two bodies in the snow, howling in the dark, and a house full of airtight alibis. Lady Baskerville is convinced her brother Stapleton survived after all. View on Amazon →
#16 — Watson on the Orient Express · April 2020
Watson's book. Kidnapped in London, he overhears a plot to kill Holmes, escapes, and finds himself framed for murder and running through France. His way home is a berth on the Orient Express beside a killer Holmes has hunted for months. View on Amazon →
#17 — Kidnapped at the Tower · May 2020
A small boy and his nanny vanish inside the Tower of London, in front of the Yeoman Warders. The ransom notes that follow contradict one another, which tells Holmes the kidnapping is not what it looks like. View on Amazon →
#18 — Five Pink Ladies · May 2020
Flynn again, and a grand feast that goes wrong in every direction at once. One of the lighter entries, and a good one to hand a younger reader. View on Amazon →
#19 — The Solitary Witness · June 2020
Lady Constance's testimony will convict a murderer if she lives long enough to give it. After a sharpshooter's near miss, Holmes and Lucy stage an elaborate decoy — carriages, a hotel suite, the lot — to send the killer's men the wrong way. View on Amazon →
#20 — The Body in the Bookseller's · July 2020
London, 1899. A secret government packet has gone missing and the only lead is a spy with a conspicuous fondness for rare books. The trail runs through the back rooms of the London book trade. View on Amazon →
#21 — The Curse of Cleopatra's Needle · September 2020
An heiress is found dead at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle, the scene arranged around a message promising worse to come. Her husband's alibi is thin, but the cult behind the threats is the bigger problem. View on Amazon →
#22 — The Coded Blue Envelope · October 2020
Milan, 1899, and La Scala. Lucy's mother, the singer Zoe Rosario, is handed a coded blue envelope by a desperate stranger, and the opera house turns out to be the safest place in the story. View on Amazon →
#23 — Christmas on the Nile · December 2020
December 1899: Lucy's mother is taken by a familiar mastermind, and the rescue runs from London to Egypt over Christmas. The most travelogue-ish book in the series. View on Amazon →
#24 — The Missing Mariner · February 2021
Two cases collide — a sailor who never came home, and a painting stolen from Hampton Court that leaves one warder dead and another missing. When the missing warder turns up murdered, Lestrade sends for Baker Street. View on Amazon →
#25 — Powder Island · April 2021
An explosion at the Rexford Gunpowder Works kills a custodian at dawn. Gregson smells sabotage; the truth is closer to home and considerably nastier. View on Amazon →
#26 — Murder at the Royal Observatory · June 2021
An astronomer's assistant is found dead outside the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, with witnesses describing black smoke and a green flash. London wants to talk about Martians. Holmes wants to know who ransacked the house. View on Amazon →
#27 — The Bloomsbury Guru · September 2021
A fashionable Bloomsbury guru is selling wisdom and wealth to the London elite. Behind the incense there is blackmail, and behind the blackmail there is a body. View on Amazon →
#28 — Holmes takes a Holiday · October 2021
Holmes, Lucy and company decamp to Lake Windermere in straw hats and light disguise. The holiday lasts about a chapter and a half. View on Amazon →
#29 — Holmes Picks a Winner · December 2021
Amy Thiel is kidnapped into a scheme built around Royal Ascot. The message she smuggles out is intercepted, leaving the Baker Street team working from a stray remark Becky overheard weeks earlier. View on Amazon →
#30 — Galahad's Castle · July 2022
A nobleman who styles himself Galahad is restoring his crumbling castle into a monument to chivalry on his wife's American money. The medieval pageantry turns out to be excellent cover. View on Amazon →
#31 — The Loch Ness Horror · December 2022
London, 1900: the lady detective Violet Leverton is taken by a Scotsman with a grudge and a case of stolen bonds. A bomb cuts Whitehall's water supply the same week, and with an election looming Mycroft wants Sherlock and Lucy on both. View on Amazon →
#32 — The Adair Murders · June 2023
Lord and Lady Adair are murdered outside their estate along with their coachman, and their heiress daughter will not say where she was. What Lady Hilda wants from Holmes is not an alibi but her missing diary. View on Amazon →
#33 — The Cornwall Mermaid · September 2023
June 1901: a captured German spy reveals a breach in Britain's military communications, and the trail leads to the Cornish coast and a village convinced it has seen a mermaid. View on Amazon →
#34 — Miss Nightingale's Gala · February 2024
London, 1902. Florence Nightingale hosts a charity gala at the Carlton for St Thomas' Hospital, and the evening produces a murder among the gowns and the donors. View on Amazon →
#35 — The Affair of the Coronation Ball · April 2024
Six murders shadow Edward VII's coronation, the latest a gossip columnist who knew too much about too many people. The most conspiracy-shaped book in the run. View on Amazon →
#36 — The Adventure of the Time Machine · August 2024
October 1902: H. G. Wells sends Watson to a man claiming to be a time traveller from ancient Rome. The claim is nonsense; the trap around it is not. The most recent entry in the series. View on Amazon →
Where to start
Two honest answers. The Last Moriarty is book one and the proper beginning, but it is the most Holmes-and-Watson of the run — Lucy is barely in it, and readers who came for her sometimes stall. Remember, Remember, book three, is where the series becomes the series: it is told largely from Lucy’s side, it explains the family situation, and everything after it follows naturally. Starting there costs you two books of setup you can pick up later.
The Christmas entries — Flynn’s Christmas, Christmas at Baskerville Hall and Christmas on the Nile — read well on their own if you want a sample before committing to thirty-six books.
There is also The Collected Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Short Stories, plus two Collected Stories season volumes. Those gather shorts that sit alongside the numbered books rather than advancing the story, so they are optional.
The Becky and Flynn Mysteries in Order
Five books, and the darkest thing Elliott and Veley have written. Becky Kelly and Flynn were children in the Baker Street books; here they are grown, and the war has taken them to the Western Front. The mysteries are still fair-play puzzles, but the setting is trenches, field hospitals and Zeppelin raids rather than drawing rooms. Read the main series first — these lean on characters you will already know.
#1 — Guarded Ground · October 2021
The Western Front, 1915. Flynn, once a Baker Street Irregular, is a soldier now; Becky Kelly is nursing behind the lines. A traitor in their own ranks pulls them back together. View on Amazon →
#2 — Hidden Harm · March 2022
1916, and the front again. A mission that starts as reconnaissance turns into a hunt for someone selling British positions. View on Amazon →
#3 — Watch and Ward · November 2022
London, 1915, under Zeppelin raids. A Christmas case that keeps Becky and Flynn in the blackout streets rather than the trenches. View on Amazon →
#4 — Safe You Sleep · May 2023
December 1915: Becky lies in a coma and framed for treason while Flynn works to clear her, with a sabotage plot moving down the railway lines. View on Amazon →
#5 — Star-Sown Sky · December 2023
London, 1916. A figure out of Sherlock's past sets Becky an impossible choice. The series ends here, and it ends deliberately. View on Amazon →
The Homefront Sleuths in Order
Elliott’s newest series, and the one to pick up if the Victorian books are not your period. Eleven books so far, published at roughly one every two months since January 2025, set in the village of Crofter’s Green during the Second World War. Five women, one Pomeranian, and a run of murders that the local police would rather not look at too closely. No connection to the Holmes books — you can start here cold.
#1 — The Blackout Murders · January 2025
1941. Five women in the village of Crofter's Green form an unlikely investigating committee when a blackout death turns out not to be an accident. Book one, and the one to start with. View on Amazon →
#2 — The Spectre of Hawthorne Manor · February 2025
Evie Harris does not believe in ghosts, which becomes awkward when she watches one cross the lawn at Hawthorne Manor. Secrets, a séance and a Pomeranian. View on Amazon →
#3 — The Spitfire Murders · March 2025
A security guard dies at the aircraft factory in circumstances nobody wants examined. The Sleuths examine them anyway. View on Amazon →
#4 — The Judas Monk Murders · May 2025
A young commando goes missing and the village fills up with people who would rather he stayed missing. View on Amazon →
#5 — The Murders at Clarion Castle · July 2025
July 1941: Evie vanishes after visiting her late fiancé's family castle, leaving the others a dying butler and a great many locked rooms. View on Amazon →
#6 — The Harvest Festival Murders · September 2025
Harvest festival, a wedding to plan, and a body that ruins both. View on Amazon →
#7 — The Scrooge Conspiracy · November 2025
Christmas comes to Crofter's Green early, and so does murder, in the shape of a charming American with an interest in the village's secrets. View on Amazon →
#8 — The Valentine Cipher · January 2026
Seven couples are marrying at a Valentine's ceremony. One of them has a very good reason to want the day cancelled. View on Amazon →
#9 — The Saint Mary's Cipher · March 2026
Palm Sunday, a crashed postal van, and a registered parcel Dorothy should never have agreed to hold. View on Amazon →
#10 — The Celluloid Sentry · June 2026
June 1942: a film unit arrives to shoot a morale picture in the village, bringing klieg lights, scandal and a corpse. View on Amazon →
#11 — The Ghost Fleet Murders · August 2026
August 1942: the Sleuths head for the Kent coast and one of the strangest secrets of the war — a fleet of ships that does not exist. View on Amazon →
Where to go next
If the period is the draw, our guide to British cozy mysteries covers the wider historical-village shelf, and cozy mysteries with women sleuths picks up the amateur-detective thread that Lucy belongs to. The three Christmas entries fit neatly into our Christmas cozy mysteries list, and the A–Z of cozy mystery authors is the place to browse sideways.
You can see everything we hold on the Anna Elliott author page, or go straight to Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James, Becky and Flynn and the Homefront Sleuths.