The first cycle, the eight-book Artemis Fowl, follows elf Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance (LEPRecon) officer Holly Short as she faces the forces of criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl II; later on in the cycle the adversaries are forced to work together, gradually becoming firm friends/brief love interests while saving the world.

[4] In the first book, Artemis Fowl, pitched as "Die Hard with fairies",[5] twelve-year-old child prodigy Artemis Fowl II and his bodyguard Butler kidnap Holly Short, an elf and a captain of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance force (LEPrecon), holding her for a ransom of one ton of gold to exploit the magical Fairy People and restore his family's fortune.

The Fowl Twins series, alternatively titled the Second Cycle of The Fowl Adventures, set five years later, follows Artemis' younger twin brothers as they live out their house arrest under the supervision of "pixel" Lazuli Heitz, an elf-pixie hybrid, and NANNI, an artificial intelligence based on Holly's and Artemis' brainwaves.

It follows Holly Short, the first female reconnaissance officer of the Lower Elements Police (LEP), after she is kidnapped by criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl II for a large ransom of 24-karat gold with the help of his bodyguard Domovoi Butler (and Butler's younger sister Juliet) in order to restore the Fowl family fortune.

After multiple failed attempts by the LEP to undermine his plot, the book concludes with Artemis finally releasing Holly, in exchange for having his mother cured of madness and half of the ransomed gold that he had persuaded the fairies to give him restored to them, manipulating the LEP's honor system and time-stop to prevent them from killing him afterward.

Jon Spiro is an American businessman who has his bodyguard Arno Blunt kill Butler and steals Artemis's C Cube, which is a handheld supercomputer that he made from stolen fairy technology left over from the Fowl Manor siege in book 1.

Artemis puts Butler into a fish freezer in an emergency attempt at cryonic preservation, and he is eventually resurrected by the elf Holly Short.

They knock Leon unconscious and create a bomb explosion powerful enough for them to use its energy – converting it into enough magic to send the island back to earth, where three years have passed because of the time spell.

Things get more complicated when Opal Koboi is revealed to be controlling the Extinctionists and feeding on the brain fluids of many extremely rare animals.

While doing so, they (reluctantly) battle Artemis's possessed toddler brother Myles, who reveals to them Opal's plan after the fairy warrior spirit left his body.

Artemis and his friends fail to destroy the second gate with a laser he created, and Mulch saves them from possessed pirate corpses, causing the spirits of fairy warriors to leave their bodies to the afterlife.

The Artemis Fowl Files is a companion book to the series published 4 October 2004, which included The Seventh Dwarf and other stories.

Following his father's presumed death at the hands of the Russian Mafia, and his mother's subsequent descent into madness, Artemis stopped attending his boarding school, assumed control of the Fowl criminal empire, and embarked on a crime spree to restore the family fortune and fund Arctic expeditions to rescue his father.

Artemis is famed for his intelligence; he claims to have the "highest IQ tested in Europe", but is also known for a lack of coordination and athletic ability.

He is the third-most skilled martial artist on the planet (the first is a monk on a Pacific Island and the second is his uncle), a formidable marksman and firearms expert, and has immense experience of the criminal underworld, often providing help to Artemis through his many contacts.

Butler is rendered dead temporarily in The Eternity Code, but is rescued by the ingenuity of his principal and the healing powers of Holly Short.

Butler's favored weapon is a treasured SIG Sauer P226 pistol chambered in 9mm Parabellum, but he often must resort to other fairy weaponry for his tasks.

His sarcasm and talkative nature often annoy LEP officers, though his greatest pleasure outside of his engineering is aggravating the notoriously bad-tempered Commander Root.

He 'hitches' or marries a centaur named Caballine in The Lost Colony while Captain Short and Artemis are in Limbo, and apparently has foals.

In The Opal Deception, she creates a clone of herself to escape imprisonment, later killing Julius Root rather violently with a bomb, and framing Holly Short.

In the past, it is revealed that she harvested a silky silfaka lemur's brain fluid as one of the steps to achieving world domination.

Julius Root commanded the LEPrecon and was in charge of all activities related to the tracking of those who leave fairy civilization, to prevent them making contact with humans.

Their plan suddenly goes wrong when LEP technical consultant Foaly inserts a video in Koboi Laboratories to expose Briar Cudgeon's confessions to treachery to Opal.

[28] The Guardian gave a favorable review to The Atlantis Complex, the seventh book in the series, but noted "it is also clearly a prelude to the grand finale.

[33] In 2010 Artemis Fowl was selected by readers as the favorite Puffin Books title of all time, which Colfer described as his "proudest professional moment.

[41] In September 2015, Variety reported that Kenneth Branagh had been hired to direct the film for Disney, with Irish playwright Conor McPherson as screenwriter and Judy Hofflund as an executive producer.

[42] Eoin Colfer confirmed this in a video to Artemis Fowl Confidential,[43] and spoke with RTE Radio 1 about meeting Branagh several times to discuss this prior to the announcement.

[46] On 20 December 2017, it was announced that Irish newcomer Ferdia Shaw had been cast as Artemis Fowl II, alongside Judi Dench as Commander Root, Josh Gad as Mulch Diggums, Lara McDonnell as Captain Holly Short, and Nonso Anozie as Butler.

[53] McDonnell's casting was also criticised as whitewashing due to Short being physically described in the book series as having nut-brown skin of a coffee complexion.

[54] The casting of Nonso Anozie as Butler was also criticised for several reasons: that the character is described as Eurasian who can pass as Japanese and Russian in the book series, and that the character's physical description of terrifying anyone in his presence, combined with his backstory of his family having served the Fowl family for centuries and Anozie's casting, embodies several stereotypes of African Americans, in particular the "scary black man" and "black servant" tropes.