By Katherine Abissi

If you like mystery that’s a bit out of this world, you should seek out Lockwood & Co., a five-book supernatural mystery series written by Jonathan Stroud. The series is written in first person perspective and follows Lucy Carlyle, a teenage agent who fights alongside her coworkers, George Cubbins and Anthony Lockwood, to protect their society from ghost attacks. Stroud has turned the ambiguity of the afterlife into a concrete construct which plagues the living, especially children. These children have the talents of sight, hearing, touch, and research, which they use to detect and fight ghosts who materialize at night to terrorize the living. After an accident in her hometown, Lucy hastily joins Lockwood & Company, an independent ghost fighting agency. Together, Lucy, Lockwood, and George solve many mysterious cases and fight dangerous ghosts while hunting for the cause of the hauntings.

In each, Stroud follows a similar structure: the hook, the background, the main mystery, the final battle, and the twist. Like many authors, Stroud’s hook tends to be a battle with a ghost or multiple ghosts. After the attention-getting opening, he provides the reader with background information about where and what the characters have been doing. Next, the main mystery is introduced and developed throughout the book, often interwoven with other cases. During the action-packed finale, a twist is revealed in dramatic fashion. The cards are down, and the chips are out; the agents of Lockwood & Co. never falter and bravely rally to success. The structure Stroud creates captivates the readers, making the series quite addicting. The unique world Stroud has created is colored by the affable qualities of the characters of Lockwood, Lucy, and George, whose found family dynamic adds a wonderful layer to the story.

The Lockwood & Co. series has been adapted into a TV show by Netflix and recently celebrated its two-year anniversary. The show, which stars Ruby Stokes, Cameron Chapman, and Ali Hadji-Heshmati, has one season that covers the events of the first two books, The Screaming Staircase and The Whispering Skull. While the series was well received, Netflix cancelled it after its pilot season. Fortunately, Stroud’s addicting books continue to be sold in stores and online.