Dr. Tabitha Books in Order

The Dr. Tabitha books move Craig Stephen Copland's love of deduction into a very different city and a very different decade. These are historical mysteries set in New York during the 1920s, a period full of money, speed, glamour, argument, and trouble.

Dr. Tabitha Stancović sits at the center of it all.

She is a pathologist, which means bodies come to her before neat explanations do. She is also, as the series makes clear, someone who learned the science of deduction from Sherlock Holmes himself. That gives the books a quiet bridge back to Copland's Holmes work without making them feel like copies. Tabitha is her own lead, practical, intelligent, and willing to push past what the police or the newspapers find convenient. Beside her is Sergeant Johan Klassen, a veteran who spent years in the trenches of the First World War. Together they make a strong investigative pair, one grounded in medical evidence, the other in field experience and steadiness under pressure.

The setting matters as much as the characters. These books are not just mysteries that happen to wear period clothes. They are built around the actual tensions of the era. Them That Trust in Riches opens around the 1920 Wall Street bombing. In the Big Inning uses the 1921 World Series. As Straw Before the Wind turns the odd, very real straw-hat unrest of 1922 into a murder case. And the Books Were Opened heads into the Morgan Library. Later books move through the Scopes-era culture wars and the high-risk world of early aviation.

So the series has range.

On the surface, Roaring Twenties New York offers style, parties, celebrity, technology, and booming money. Underneath, Copland finds organized crime, class friction, public fear, political extremism, and people ready to profit from chaos. That contrast gives the books their tension. Tabitha is often working cases where the official story is too tidy, too political, or simply too lazy. Because she sees the dead up close, she is hard to fool.

The tone lands somewhere between historical thriller and detective novel. These books are usually faster and more outward-looking than the Holmes pastiches. They care about city life, headlines, and large events pressing in on private crimes. At the same time, they still deliver the core pleasure of clue-based mystery fiction. Tabitha and Klassen gather facts, test explanations, and keep going when the easy answer falls apart.

If you like crime fiction with a strong sense of place, this series has plenty to offer. It gives you New York at a moment when everything seemed to be changing at once, and then sends a sharp, skeptical doctor into the middle of the mess to ask what really happened.