Lockwood & Co. Books in Order

In Lockwood & Co., Britain has been living with a ghost epidemic for decades. The dead do not just linger, they kill with a touch, and adults are mostly useless against them. Only children and teenagers can sense supernatural Visitors well enough to track them, identify their sources, and survive a close encounter. That one idea shapes the whole series. Ghost-hunting becomes a profession, London becomes a city of alarms and curfews, and young operatives do work that should frighten every adult in sight.

At the center is Lucy Carlyle, a talented young agent who arrives in London after things go badly wrong elsewhere. She ends up at the city's smallest psychic investigation agency, run by Anthony Lockwood and backed up by the sharp, scruffy researcher George Cubbins. Later books widen the circle, but that core trio gives the series its pulse. Lucy brings the viewpoint and a rare sensitivity to voices from the dead. Lockwood brings nerve, charm, and a tendency to walk straight at trouble. George brings research, patience, and the stubborn practical thinking that keeps everyone alive.

The tools of the trade are simple and memorable, iron chains, salt bombs, magnesium flares, rapiers, and a lot of tea. The cases are not simple at all. One book may start with a haunted house, a troubled grave, or a skull muttering in a jar, then widen into something much larger. Each investigation works as its own mystery, but the novels keep feeding a bigger story about the history of the Problem, the secrets buried in London, and the private grief each main character is carrying.

It gets properly creepy.

That said, the series is never only about scares. The real engine is the chemistry between the characters. Lucy's dry voice, Lockwood's confidence, George's grumbling intelligence, and the group's slow-growing loyalty give the books a warm center even when the corridors are full of spectres. The tone sits in a sweet spot between supernatural thriller, detective story, and found-family adventure. There are jokes exactly when you need them, then a sudden turn that reminds you ghosts in this world are genuinely dangerous.

Across the five main novels, the stakes rise from local hauntings to questions about how the whole system works and who benefits from it. The books keep circling ideas about grief, exploitation, memory, and the strange burden placed on the young. They also make great use of their setting, cemeteries, locked rooms, abandoned buildings, dusty archives, and a London that feels both familiar and wrong. The Screaming Staircase is the clear place to start, and the story builds cleanly from there to The Empty Grave. The series was later adapted for television, but on the page its biggest strength is there from the first chapter, it makes the haunted feel both scary and oddly livable.