Fifth Heart Books in Order

The Fifth Heart cycle currently centers on a single novel, The Fifth Heart, which imagines an impossible partnership between Sherlock Holmes and American novelist Henry James. It's both a historical mystery and a playful look at what it means to be fictional.

The story opens in 1893 Paris, where a despondent Henry James is considering jumping into the Seine. On the bridge he meets another would-be suicide: Sherlock Holmes, freshly survived from the Reichenbach Falls and convinced he might not be a real man at all but a character on someone's page. Holmes interrupts both attempts and briskly co-opts James as his new companion.

The pair soon travel to the United States to look into the death of Clover Adams, a brilliant socialite and photographer whose supposed suicide has never fully sat right with her friends. A series of anonymous cards bearing the message "She was murdered" has reached both Holmes and the surviving members of Clover's tight-knit circle, known as the Five Hearts. James's social connections open doors in Washington drawing rooms that Holmes could never reach alone.

As they dig, the case widens into a larger plot involving anarchists, political power brokers, and threats to several nations. The investigation carries them from Boston and Washington to the "White City" of the Chicago World's Fair, with cameos from real historical figures along the way. Holmes brings his usual razor logic; James brings a skeptical, self-doubting narrative voice and a sharp eye for social nuance.

Underneath the whodunit, Simmons plays with questions of identity and authorship. Holmes keeps circling the idea that he may be only ink on paper, while James measures his friend against the tidy stories Arthur Conan Doyle published. The book lingers on late-19th-century settings – gas-lit streets, crowded parlors, the fair's grand pavilions – and on the way both men carry private grief behind their formal manners.

You can read The Fifth Heart without deep knowledge of either author, but fans of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and late-Victorian literature will catch plenty of nods. It stands alone for now, yet the series banner leaves room for more cases that blend classic detective fiction with richly detailed historical backdrops.