Avery & Blake Books in Order

The Avery & Blake books are historical mysteries built around an uneasy but memorable partnership. The series begins in 1837 India with The Strangler Vine, then moves to early Victorian London for The Printer's Coffin, first published as The Infidel Stain, and The Devil's Feast. Across all three books, M. J. Carter mixes investigation, adventure, and politics, with settings that matter as much as the crimes.

William Avery is usually the way in. He starts as a young East India Company officer, decent, educated, and often less worldly than he thinks he is. Avery wants order, duty, and a clear line between right and wrong. The trouble is that the worlds he moves through, from Company India to London clubs and slums, rarely offer anything so tidy.

Blake is the harder man to pin down.

Jeremiah Blake is older, rougher, and much less trusting. He is clever with languages, skilled at slipping between social worlds, and deeply suspicious of official power. Where Avery is respectable and cautious, Blake is prickly, elusive, and used to operating near the edges. A lot of the energy in the series comes from that mismatch. They do not fit together easily, which makes the slow growth of trust between them feel earned.

The settings give the books much of their force. In The Strangler Vine, Carter uses East India Company India not just as backdrop but as the engine of the story, with imperial rule, rumor, and competing versions of truth pressing on every step of the investigation. When the series shifts to London, the city is just as alive. The printing district, the back streets, and the grand rooms of the Reform Club all carry their own tensions, and each case opens onto larger questions about class, reform, publicity, and who gets protected.

These are not cozy mysteries. The crimes lead straight into institutions, reputations, and people with money or influence, and the books keep asking what the powerful choose to hide. At the same time, they are brisk, readable, and often dryly funny. Carter has a historian's interest in systems, but she never loses sight of character.

What really carries the series is the partnership at its center. If you like detective fiction where the sleuthing reveals something larger about the world, Avery and Blake are a strong fit. The trilogy gives you murder plots and pursuit scenes, but also a running look at friendship, divided loyalties, and the pressures of empire, ambition, and respectability.