16 books like Merrily Watkins Mysteries

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. 

Flavia de Luce is surely one of the most original—and the most delightful—detective characters ever written. The precocious eleven-year-old lives in a crumbling manor house in the English countryside, with her vague father, beastly older sisters, and faithful retainer Dogger. Her interest in chemistry—and death—tend her get her into trouble on a regular basis. In this book, Flavia is on the scene when the body of the church organist turns up in the medieval tomb of St Tancred, the parish church’s patron saint. Predictably, she sets out to solve the murder, tearing about the village on her faithful bicycle Gladys. Alan Bradley evokes a world—rural England in the 1950s—that many of us would love to return to (in spite of the murders!) and has created an unforgettable heroine. If you enjoy mysteries that make you smile, rather than… show more.

This trilogy of novels is altogether darker than Sayers, as Andrew Taylor tackles nothing less ambitious than ‘the making of a murderer,’ as well as the history of the Church of England in the twentieth century. If the latter sounds dull, it’s not! Figuratively looking through the wrong end of a telescope, he peels away the layers of the story as he goes backward in time in the cathedral city of Rosington, from the wrenching kidnapping of the daughter of a woman priest, to the events in the far past which culminated in tragedy. Like Dorothy Sayers, though, Andrew Taylor grew up as the child of an Anglican clergyman, so there is real authenticity here, as well as fine writing and a gift for creating suspense.

From the very beginning of her writing career, I’ve loved the novels of P.D. James. Her clear-eyed understanding of the human condition, and the precision of her writing, have always set her a bit apart from other writers in the genre, but this novel blew me away. As she explores the death of two men in the crypt of a London church—one a prominent member of Parliament, the other a homeless vagrant—she transcends genre altogether and creates a work of such depth and complexity that it resonates with me still, many years later. She wrote some fine books both before and after, but this will always be for me the high water mark of one of my all-time favourite writers—and role models.

I loved both the richly evoked setting of the Lincolnshire Fens and the detailed knowledge of bell-ringing. The latter is not just an add-on. The knowledge of change-ringing is crucial to solving the cipher in a document found in the bell-chamber. It also has a very real bearing on the death of the victim. 

I really enjoy books that leave me feeling I’ve been enriched and not merely entertained.

In other books by Sayers I warmed to the character of Harriet Vane and the frisson of the relationship between her and the investigator Lord Peter Wimsey.

I enjoyed learning about religion from Dan Brown. I am not a religious person, so presenting so much research in a tightly bound thriller was an excellent way to keep me engaged and reading.

I came away from this book with a deeper psychological understanding of God and the devil.

At times, C.S. Lewis eschewed writing what would be expected of him. For example, every volume of his Chronicles of Narnia takes the reader in a new direction, a new aspect of that fantasy world, instead of merely rehashing the popular story of the first novel, as many series do.

Science Fiction was not his field, yet Dr. Lewis dived into the genre for three novels and proved he was a master. The third book in Dr. Lewis’s space trilogy continues the epic interplanetary story of the first two but brings the tale to a dystopian Earth.

At first, the story seems unrelated to the earlier space-traveling books of the trilogy, as an engrossing study of professors playing politics and strange dreams. As the novel progresses, however, this proves to be a much larger story involving aliens, demons, the very fabric of human existence, and the return of Merlin. 

Charles Williams’s books have been described as “supernatural thrillers.” Many later authors have tried to use the theme of a recently-rediscovered ancient holy relic, which various people want to get hold of for good or evil purposes, in this case the Holy Grail or Graal, but few have done it as well as Charles Williams. I’ve read it at least five times, and I also think it has one of the most attention-grabbing opening lines in fiction: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.”

This book messed with my head in all the right ways. I expected scares, but I didn’t expect the emotional gut-punch.

It’s not just about death; it’s about grief, denial, and how far someone will go to outrun the pain.

You feel the characters trying to escape what’s coming, running from fear, from loss, from truth, but it always catches up. The horror creeps in slowly, then hits like a truck, literally. Once the line between life and death is crossed, there’s no turning back. 

It’s one of the few books that left me genuinely unsettled because I understood the choices, even when they led straight into darkness.