Having discovered Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes when she was 10,[4][5] her interest in the famous sleuth continues to be part of her life as a member of both The Baker Street Irregulars and Baker Street Babes.[4][6] Faye described the debt all mystery authors owe to Conan Doyle saying "You can’t escape Sherlock Holmes as a mystery writer. You simply cannot. It would be like trying to deal with astrophysics without Newton or modern art without Picasso."[7]
Faye's debut novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, was published in 2009. Caleb Carr said of this book: "At long last, an author of rare talent combines a thorough, enthusiastic knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes canon with truly rigorous research into, and respect for, what remains one of the greatest and most horrifying unsolved murder cases in modern history: the Jack the Ripper killings."[8]
Faye's Timothy Wilde series includes three books: The Gods of Gotham, Seven for a Secret, and The Fatal Flame. Set in New York City in the 1840s, the trilogy's protagonist, Timothy Wilde, is a 27-year-old former bartender who is a policeman in New York’s newly formed police force.[9]
2016's Jane Steele "reimagines Charlotte Brontë’s heroine as a killer".[10]The Paragon Hotel, published in 2019, is set in 1921 in Portland, Oregon. Publishers Weekly called The King of Infinite Space, published in 2021, an "enthralling riff on Hamlet, set in contemporary New York City".[11]