Christopher Huang Books in Order

Where to Start Reading Christopher Huang

If you are new to Christopher Huang’s work, the absolute best starting point is his award-winning debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder (2018). This book serves as the perfect introduction to his style: a meticulous homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction—drawing comparisons to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers—imbued with a modern understanding of trauma, identity, and historical realism. Reading this book first introduces you to Lieutenant Eric Peterkin, a half-Chinese, half-British veteran of the Great War, who serves as the central sleuth in Huang's primary series.

If you prefer a self-contained mystery before committing to a series, you can start with his standalone novel, Unnatural Ends (2023). It is a dark, Shakespearean family drama that requires no prior knowledge of his other works and showcases the author’s talent for intricate puzzle-box setups and historical family conflicts.

The Eric Peterkin Series in Order

The Eric Peterkin mysteries follow a traditional chronological sequence, matching their publication order. The series follows a shell-shocked veteran navigating the high-society clubs and deep-seated prejudices of 1920s London. Here is the recommended reading order:

• A Gentleman’s Murder (2018): Set in 1924, this novel introduces Eric Peterkin as he investigates a murder inside the prestigious Britannia Club—a London club for soldiers. When a member is stabbed to death inside a vault during a bet, Eric must unravel a web of wartime secrets, shell shock, and elite society cover-ups.
• A Pretender’s Murder (2026): Set in 1925, this second installment finds Eric Peterkin working as the secretary of the Britannia Club. The peace is shattered when the club’s acting president, Colonel Hadrian Russell, is shot and thrown from a window. The mystery takes Eric from the streets of London to Flanders and a Swiss sanatorium, uncovering wartime espionage and family grudges.

The "Peterkin Investigates" Companion Games

In 2016, prior to publishing his debut novel, Christopher Huang created a trio of text-based interactive parser games featuring Eric Peterkin. These games are closed-house logic puzzles where players gather clues and solve mysteries using deductive reasoning:

• Mustard, Music, and Murder (2016)
• Point Blank Blank (2016)
• Labour’s Letters Lost (2016)

Note on availability: These games were originally hosted on the dedicated website peterkin-investigates.com, which is no longer active. While they are still cataloged on the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and IFWiki, they can be difficult to locate and run without using archived versions or emulator files.

Standalone Novels & Interactive Fiction

Beyond the Eric Peterkin series, Huang has written standalone books and interactive text-based novels that span different formats and genres:

Unnatural Ends (2023)

This standalone historical mystery is set in a gloomy English estate. Sir Lawrence Linwood, a tyrannical and wealthy patriarch, is brutally murdered. His will dictates a bizarre challenge: his estate will not go to his children equally, but entirely to whichever of his three adopted siblings can successfully identify his killer. The siblings are forced to compete against one another, uncovering disturbing secrets about their upbringing, experimental sciences of the era, and the dark truth behind their father’s life.

Choice of Games & Early Interactive Fiction

Before achieving success as a traditional novelist, Huang was an active member of the interactive fiction community, writing under his name and the pseudonym "Virgil Hilts":

• Sunday Afternoon (2012): A parser-based historical game written under the pseudonym Virgil Hilts. Set in a Victorian mansion, it follows a bored young boy stuck indoors while adult drama unfolds in the background. It placed 5th in the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition.
• The Hero Unmasked! (2017): Published by Choice of Games, this is a massive, 300,000-word text-based interactive superhero novel. Players step into the shoes of a character who must masquerade as their kidnapped twin sibling—the city's premier masked superhero, the Swashbuckler—to save them and protect the city from supervillains.

What to Know Before You Start

Christopher Huang’s writing is heavily influenced by the Golden Age of detective fiction, but he updates the genre with a modern sensibility. While authors like Agatha Christie often treated the Great War as a distant backdrop, Huang places the physical and mental scars of World War I at the very center of his stories. Readers should expect recurring themes of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or "shell shock," the rigid British class system, and the experience of being an outsider in post-war society.

Huang’s own background informs this unique perspective. Born in Singapore, he served as an army signaller during his National Service before moving to Canada at age 17. He studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal and worked as an architect for over a decade. After being laid off at age 40, he transitioned to full-time writing, bringing a structural eye to his mystery plotting and an outsider’s view to historical British culture.

Publication Order vs. Chronological Order Summary

For the complete experience of Christopher Huang's writing career, you can follow this simple combined publication timeline:

1. Sunday Afternoon (2012) — Interactive Fiction
2. Mustard, Music, and Murder / Point Blank Blank / Labour’s Letters Lost (2016) — Interactive Fiction
3. The Hero Unmasked! (2017) — Interactive Fiction
4. A Gentleman’s Murder (2018) — Novel (Eric Peterkin Book 1)
5. Unnatural Ends (2023) — Standalone Novel
6. A Pretender’s Murder (2026) — Novel (Eric Peterkin Book 2)