Mrs. Hudson Books in Order

This is Sherlock Holmes country, but the real action often starts in the kitchen.

Martin Davies builds these books around the people who usually stay at the edge of the famous detective's adventures, Mrs Hudson and her young assistant Flotsam. In Mrs. Hudson and the Spirits' Curse, Flotsam is an orphan taken in from the streets of London, and the series begins as she and Mrs Hudson enter service at Baker Street. From there, the pair become quiet investigators in their own right, solving problems that slip past grander minds or arrive in forms the gentlemen upstairs don't fully see.

That shift in viewpoint is what gives the series its charm. Holmes and Watson are very much present, and Davies clearly enjoys the familiar world of 221B, but the books keep asking what the household notices that the great detective does not. A visitor's muddy boots, a servant's gossip, a piece of luggage, a meal left untouched, a small change in someone's daily habits, these details matter here. Mrs Hudson brings patience, authority, and a cool head. Flotsam brings speed, curiosity, and the nerve to go where a respectable housekeeper cannot.

The setting matters too. Baker Street is the hub, but the stories range well beyond it, into Limehouse alleys, London hotels, country houses, rural parishes, and plots with diplomatic consequences. One book turns on a vanished ruby and a famous magician in Mrs Hudson and the Malabar Rose. Another follows rumors of dead men walking on the Cumbrian moors in Mrs Hudson and the Lazarus Testament. Later entries widen the canvas again with a disappearing train, a threatened politician, strange Christmas deliveries, a royal wedding in danger, and a summer inheritance battle over a missing heir.

Below stairs, nothing is ever really small.

Across the series, the steady emotional thread is the partnership between Mrs Hudson and Flotsam. Mrs Hudson is never just a background figure or comic relief. She is practical, observant, and often the calmest person in the room. Flotsam gives the books much of their warmth. Her position lets her move between classes, watching both the polished performance of polite society and the mess left behind. Together they make the mysteries feel less like abstract puzzles and more like human situations shaped by money, fear, vanity, and divided loyalties.

The tone sits in a nice middle ground. These are historical mysteries with a strong Holmes flavor, but they also have wit, warmth, and an affectionate eye for domestic life. The cases can involve murder, espionage, blackmail, theft, and politics, yet the books never lose sight of character. You can read an individual installment for its central mystery, but reading in order gives the best sense of how Baker Street works, and why the women below stairs are often the ones keeping the whole enterprise together.