Young Sherlock Holmes Reading Order: How to read Andrew Lane’s series?

Written by Andrew Lane, the Young Sherlock Holmes series tells the adventures of a teenage Sherlock Holmes before he became the renowned detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Set in Victorian England during the 1860s, the series follows a young Sherlock Holmes as he navigates through his adolescence and hones his investigative skills, learning to rely on his intellect and intuition, and forms important relationships with characters such as his mentor, Amyus Crowe, and his friend, Matty Arnatt.

How to read the Young Sherlock Holmes Series in Order?

Every entry in the Young Sherlock Holmes book series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.

1. Death Cloud – The year is 1868, and Sherlock Holmes is fourteen. His life is that of a perfectly ordinary army officer’s son: boarding school, good manners, a classical education – the backbone of the British Empire. But all that is about to change. With his father suddenly posted to India, and his mother mysteriously ‘unwell’, Sherlock is sent to stay with his eccentric uncle and aunt in their vast house in Hampshire. So begins a summer that leads Sherlock to uncover his first murder, a kidnap, corruption, and a brilliantly sinister villain of exquisitely malign intent . . .
2. Red Leech – Sherlock Holmes knows that Amyus Crow, his mysterious American tutor, has some dark secrets. But he didn’t expect to find a notorious killer, hanged by the US government, apparently alive and well in Surrey – and Crow somehow mixed up in it. When no one will tell you the truth, sometimes you have to risk all to discover it for yourself. And so begins an adventure that will take Sherlock across the ocean to America, to the center of a deadly web – where life and death are cheap, and truth has a price no sane person would pay . . .
3. Black Ice – The year is 1868, and fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes faces his most baffling mystery yet. Mycroft, his older brother, has been found with a knife in his hand, locked in a room with a corpse. Only Sherlock believes that his brother is innocent. But can he prove it?

4. Fire Storm – Sherlock has come up against some challenges in his time, but what confronts him now is baffling. His friend and her father have vanished. Their house looks as if nobody has ever lived in it. Sherlock begins to doubt his sanity, until a clever clue points him to Scotland. Following that clue leads him into a mystery that involves kidnapping, bodysnatchers and a man who claims he can raise the dead. Before he knows it, Sherlock is fighting for his life as he begins to work out what has happened to his friends. 
5. “Bedlam” (short story) – Sherlock has been incarcerated in the Bethlehem Hospital – Bedlam – where Victorian London’s most unfortunate citizens are locked away in squalor, cruelty and hopelessness. Sherlock tells them he’s not mad – but who’d believe a lunatic? There’s only one option: he has to escape – and then use all his rational powers to work out who put him there in the first place…
6. Snake Bite – Kidnapped and taken to China, Sherlock finds himself plunged into adventure. How can three men be bitten by the same poisonous snake in different parts of Shanghai? Who wants them dead, and why? The answer seems to lie in a message hidden in a diagram that looks like a spider’s web. But solving it leads to an even more urgent question: what has all this got to do with a plot to blow up an American warship? Sherlock is about to brave terrors greater than any he has faced before…
7. Knife Edge – Something sinister is afoot in the house in the west of Ireland in which Sherlock is staying. There are frightened whisperings among the servants and the house’s owners are clearly scared. But who – or what? – has terrified them so much that nobody will speak out? Young Sherlock must bring all his powers of deduction to unraveling his greatest mystery yet.

8. Stone Cold – Following his last thrilling adventure Sherlock Holmes has been sent to live in Oxford to focus on his education. But something strange is happening in the university pathology labs. Body parts are being stolen from corpses and are being posted one by one to an address in London. What can these sinister goings-on mean, and what message is someone trying to send?
9. Night Break – Sherlock’s mother has died, his father has disappeared in India and his sister is acting strangely. The Holmes family seems to be falling apart, and not even his brother Mycroft can keep it together. But while Sherlock is worrying about all of this, a man living nearby vanishes in his own house while Sherlock and Mycroft are visiting. Where did he go, and what is the connection with a massive canal being built in Egypt? The answer will rock the world, and tear the Holmes family apart!

If you like the Young Sherlock Holmes reading order, you may be interested in our list of series set in the world of Sherlock Holmes.