Marwood and Lovett Books in Order

The Marwood and Lovett books are Andrew Taylor's Restoration mysteries, set in the years after the Great Fire of London. They follow two superb leads, James Marwood and Cat Lovett, as they move through a city being rebuilt in brick, money, fear, and political intrigue. These are historical crime novels, but they also work as a running portrait of a country trying to steady itself after civil war, regicide, plague, and fire.

James Marwood is a government clerk and reluctant investigator, the son of a disgraced printer with regicide ties. Cat Lovett, later Cat Hakesby, is the daughter of another regicide and a woman with unusual talent for drawing, design, and practical problem-solving in a world that gives women very little official room to work. They come from damaged, dangerous family histories, and that shared vulnerability is one of the reasons the partnership feels so strong.

London is the great engine of the series. In The Ashes of London the city is charred and unstable after the fire. In later books it becomes a place of rebuilding schemes, court factions, property battles, foreign anxieties, secret policing, and royal appetites. Taylor is excellent on the daily texture of Restoration life, the mud, smoke, stench, cramped rooms, elegant clothes, hacked-open streets, and sudden shifts between poverty and display. The setting never feels like museum scenery. It keeps pressing on the plot.

The cases themselves are wide-ranging. Murders grow out of political fear, inheritance, revenge, espionage, sexual scandal, and the huge practical business of remaking a capital city. Marwood is often pulled toward the machinery of government and Whitehall. Cat moves through houses, building sites, workshops, and private spaces where different kinds of truth can be found. That split viewpoint gives the books real range. One sees the state. The other sees how ordinary lives get caught beneath it.

There is also a satisfying long arc to the series. The relationship between James and Cat changes gradually and believably, shaped by trust, danger, class, and the demands of survival. Taylor never lets the personal side overwhelm the mystery, but it deepens every book. By the time later secrets arrive, they matter because the characters already matter.

Restoration London is glamorous from a distance and brutal up close.

If you want historical mysteries with a real sense of time and place, clever plots, and two leads who make the whole series feel alive, Marwood and Lovett are among Andrew Taylor's best books.