13 books like Duke De Richleau

I defy any historical fiction reader or detective fiction reader not to love this book as much as I did. It is a classic of the genre: a book that has everything. From the class system to the family superstition, the role of the servants, the treatment of the convicts, and the spooky location, it cannot be faulted. 

I was in the fortunate position of having read the book before I saw any of the films, for I have not seen one that accurately captures the atmosphere. Conan Doyle dabbled with the dark side of superstition in his life, and that interest comes across strongly. 

More magic and another enchanting new world to explore. Again I found I could dissolve into the story and be there with the characters. You are taken on adventures through this strange land where magic creeps from every stone. Start with a young girl who must face trials, partake in battles and defeat those who would enslave her people. She inherits the Kystrel a magical pendant with which she can both give and take. The first of three books which I could not put down.

Ordinarily, a werewolf novel with a strong emphasis on the romance angle wouldn’t rate so highly with me, but Kelley Armstrong’s book was the right one at the right time. Elana, our heroine, is the world’s only female werewolf; her job has been killing rogue shapeshifters. She gets tired of that and tries to retire and live as a normal human, but that doesn’t work out.

What I liked about this was that it was my first exposure to a werewolf novel that really dealt with the political and social dynamics of a worldwide werewolf pack. Fortunately, Armstrong is a great storyteller, so there is more here than politics or romance. Her worldbuilding is fantastic, as evidenced by the fact this became the first in a long series of Otherworld novels.

This collection of short detective stories features Sayers’ most famous sleuth Lord Peter Whimsey, but also the lesser-known Montague Egg. Sayers was a marketing professional, and this comes out in the Egg stories, about a travelling salesman who gets involved in mysteries, the police allowing him to do so partly because of his quirky and unassuming personality. Egg frequently quotes useful maxims from his favourite book The Salesman’s Handbook, thinking laterally to solve puzzles that elude formal detectives. This book has no supernatural aspect but is included here as the idea of a ‘detective that is not a detective’ always intrigued me. I chose this device for my (very different to Egg) detective protagonist Jack Sangster, partly as a result of reading In the Teeth of the Evidence.  

Hill’s minimalist style, ability to evoke despair, and superb descriptions, combined with the most vivid of imaginations, make her a compelling writer of ghost stories. Hill generally includes all my favourite elements in her ghost stories, starting in familiar surroundings, then moving to more exotic locations, often delivering a shocking twist at the end. In The Man in the Picture, a story set in Venice during Carnival is told to the narrator by an aging professor in his Cambridge rooms on a winter’s night. You don’t read a Susan Hill book to come out feeling better afterwards, but… if you like to be left with a feeling of disquiet, even though you know it’s only a story you just read, The Man in the Picture’s definitely for you.

I love the central female character in this book, Cora Seaborne, who can swing between admirable and ridiculous over the course of a page. I love the dark atmosphere created by the marshes of the Blackwater, where Cora is determined to find evidence of a mysterious creature presumed by locals to be malevolent.

The estuary is a menacing presence in reality (people and animals are sucked in and lost in times of bad weather) and in the imaginations of the villagers. I also love the way that this provides a backdrop for various tumults of the soul experienced by the characters as Cora crashes into the settled lives of a local minister and his family, wreaking accidental havoc.

Alright, this one isn’t a Regency, and it’s not technically a romance, but it is a love story. It’s set during the Restoration period, so it’s much earlier, but it showcases how a love story can also be an adventure story and a journey of self-discovery.

The heroine, Lady Dona St. Columb, retreats to her estate in Cornwall only to find that a pirate is using her cove as a secret hideaway and her house as his own retreat. They set out on a madcap adventure and fall in love until her husband arrives and attempts to capture her lover, forcing Dona to choose between the life she has and the life she wants.

This is one of my favorite stories because the themes in it are timeless—who among us has not grappled with the same dilemma in the 21st century? I think that makes a book strong—regardless of time… show more.

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

The undisputed master of the Occult thriller, Wheatley sold over 50 million books, regularly topping best seller lists in the mid-20th Century. In To The Devil a Daughter, Wheatley contrasts the colour of the post-war French Riviera with the greyness of ration-book 1940’s Britain with a rare vividness, and atypically for the time, creates a ‘kick-ass’ middle-aged female protagonist. His descriptions of the Essex marshes, and the sinister Canon Copely-Syle who lives there, are superb. In another book, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, Wheatley describes a school (loosely based on the infamous Dartington Hall school), that partly inspired ‘The Academy’ in my own book. When reading Wheatley’s books, bear in mind he was a man of his time, as many of his views do not date well. I was massively flattered recently when a reader of my book said my style (not my views!) reminded him… show more.

No writer evokes atmosphere better than Daphne Du Maurier, and this collection of five short stories demonstrates her gifts superbly. Best known of these short stories is "Don’t Look Now," a tale of bereavement and despair with a wicked twist at the end, set in Venice and subsequently made into a superb horror movie. But the other stories within this anthology also immerse the reader in their settings, with each delivering an unexpected twist.