Lyndsay Faye Books in Order

If you want her signature historical crime series: The Gods of Gotham → Seven for a Secret → The Fatal Flame
If you want Sherlock Holmes first: Dust and Shadow → The Whole Art of Detection → Observations by Gaslight
If you like classic novels reimagined: Jane Steele → The King of Infinite Space
If you want a big standalone with gangsters and social history: The Paragon Hotel

Lyndsay Faye was born in Northern California and raised in the Pacific Northwest, but much of her fiction belongs to New York and London. She writes mysteries, historical novels, and literary reimaginings with a strong sense of place.

She later returned to the Peninsula in California and graduated from Notre Dame de Namur University with a dual degree in English and Performance. Before novels took over, she spent several years working as a professional actress around the Bay Area. That stage life came first.

Then New York changed the plan.

In 2005 she moved to Manhattan to audition as a professional actress. An odd stroke of bad luck pushed her toward fiction: the restaurant where she worked was knocked down, and the sudden gap in her schedule gave her time to write. She turned to a character she had loved since childhood, Sherlock Holmes, and built her first novel around him.

That debut was Dust and Shadow, which sends Holmes and Watson after Jack the Ripper. She kept returning to Baker Street after that, first in shorter pieces and then in the collections The Whole Art of Detection and Observations by Gaslight. Readers who love her Holmes work usually point to the same things: a convincing Watson voice, careful Victorian detail, and a version of Holmes that feels sharp and strange, but still recognizably human.

But New York kept tugging at her sleeve.

Her fascination with the birth of the New York City Police Department led to the Timothy Wilde novels, The Gods of Gotham, Seven for a Secret, and The Fatal Flame. Set in the 1840s, the books follow an ex-bartender turned early cop through fires, corruption, racial violence, and street politics. The Gods of Gotham was an Edgar finalist, and the trilogy helped establish her as a writer readers turn to for historical crime that feels lived-in rather than museum neat. The appeal is not just the cases. It is the noise, the slang, the crowded streets, and Timothy's uneasy effort to stay decent inside a system that rarely makes decency easy.

She has never stayed in one lane for long. Jane Steele twists Jane Eyre into something darker, bloodier, and more playful, while The Paragon Hotel moves into Prohibition-era America and uses gangsters, racism, and found family to tell a broader story about belonging. Later, The King of Infinite Space reworked Hamlet in a modern New York key. Very different books, same habit: Faye likes characters who are cornered, underestimated, morally complicated, or all three.

Again and again, she comes back to outsiders, divided loyalties, and cities under pressure. Whitechapel, antebellum Manhattan, and 1920s Portland are never just wallpaper in her work, and neither are the social rules her characters keep crashing into. Readers come for the mystery or the hook, but they usually stay for the voices, the wit, and the harder questions underneath.

These days, she lives in Queens. When she is not writing or editing, she has said she likes cooking, tending houseplants, doting on her cat Prufrock, and digging through thrift stores for finds. Like a lot of productive writers, she also seems to be at work on the next book already.