Books like On Beulah Height — picked by fans

It starts with arguably the most famous first line any novelist has ever written, and I certainly couldn’t stop reading once I had absorbed that.

Rebecca is a classic for all sorts of great reasons. For me, the house is a character here. Manderley is as Gothic as I could ever wish for (and I LOVE Gothic).

Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, is one of the most sinister characters ever written. When this novel was first published (1938), certain subjects were pretty much taboo. In the light of today's increased awareness of people’s differing sexualities, I think it’s probably easier to understand her motives – not that it makes her any less scary.

For me, this is a masterpiece of storytelling that defies genre categorization and puts du Maurier firmly in my top favourite authors list.

I have re-read this multiple times and still love the cold menace of this literary thriller set in Copenhagen and Greenland.

Høeg didn’t just bring the icy landscapes to life—he also opened up a whole new world of Inuit culture and life in the Arctic seas. I loved learning all these quirky facts, like the many names the Inuit have for the different types of snow.

I also adore his anti-heroine Smilla, who is a fascinating blend of contradictions: ruthless, analytical, and blunt to the point of rudeness, she is also noble, brilliant, and unexpectedly compassionate. One of my all-time favourite characters.  

I picked up this book for the setting alone as the Scottish Highlands is one of my favourite destinations and the idea of a suspenseful mystery set there was just too good to resist.

The story takes place over a snowy New Year’s Eve in a hunting lodge surrounded by the mist and mountains of Scotland. While I didn’t find any of the characters particularly sympathetic (which was possibly the point!), the atmospheric setting more than made up for that, and I enjoyed imagining what I might have done had I been one of the members of this party, trapped in this isolated place. 

To be honest, I could have completed this list with just Mary Stewart titles alone!

No one does lush, atmospheric suspense like she does. I discovered her books as a lonely teenager dreaming of escape, and her rich, immersive writing has inspired me not only to follow in her footsteps as an author but also to travel on “book pilgrimages” to find the settings of her wonderful stories.

And I don’t just mean ticking off a tourist spot with an Instagram selfie—I mean hours building an itinerary with guidebooks, Google Maps, and her novels to find the exact beach in southern Crete or the exact village in Provence that her heroines visited. 

What I love the most is the settings woven into the plot, so that the stories couldn’t have happened anywhere else, and so vivid that they are a character in their own right. In The Moonspinners, for… show more.

When Peter Robinson passed away in 2022, he had written 28 novels in the Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks series.

Robinson needs no introduction here, but I have included him on this list because he sets these novels in a fictional town in the Yorkshire Dales, close to where I grew up, and also because he was very encouraging to me personally when I wrote my first Joe Romano novel.

Whereas the books are very much mainstream crime novels, they also have a literary quality to them. He manages to achieve a fine balance between genre fiction and a more literary style. You often forget that you’re reading crime at all.

The series was also made into TV series (DCI Banks) starring Stephen Tompkinson, which ran for five series, and really captures the essence of the books.

I very much doubt that Reginald Hill intended Pictures of Perfection to appear on a Best M/M list! It’s a quintessentially English tale with a backdrop of class-based snobbery and the threat to rural life from development. It’s also the sole book in Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe mystery series wherein Hill’s gay detective sergeant, Edgar Wield, takes centre stage. Wield finds more than a missing policeman when he’s sent to the village of Enscombe! Nothing to worry even the most sex-repulsed asexual here although, with hindsight, these stories can seem problematic in other ways: Dalziel is so non-woke. However, it was being a fan of Wield and Hill’s books that got me writing my own gay mysteries, so I’m ever grateful.

This is the first book in George’s twenty-one book series featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton, and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, a commoner.

When I read A Great Deliverance, I fell in love with George’s beautiful writing, found her two characters fascinating, and adored the cast of characters supporting the detectives. Plus, the book is unusual because the reader knows from the start who the killer is and the investigation focuses on why she killed him.

When I sat down to write my first ever fiction, Linley and Havers were the inspiration for my two detectives, NYPD Detectives Chiara Corelli and P.J. Parker. And I learned from George that the characters are as important, if not more important, than the plot. She inspired my writing.

As a writer I look to Crombie’s Constable Duncan Kincaid/Sergeant Gemma James series for guidance on how to have your characters grow professionally and personally, to age and experience the kind of changes people go through in real life. I recommend book one of the nineteen in the series, A Share in Death, because it sets up the relationship between the two detectives.

Peter Robinson has managed to create a character, DCI Alan Banks, who remains likeable even though he can be petty, headstrong and displays behavioural traits not expected of a top police officer. We can all empathise with him when he acts in a way that causes him shame and regret.

In Strange Affair he’s become depressed after a devastating fire at his cottage. But he’s shaken out of his lethargy when he gets a telephone call to say his estranged brother Roy is missing and Roy’s girlfriend has been shot dead. 

The clever plot involves Banks digging into his brother’s life and discovering Roy’s dodgy business practices which threaten to engulf Banks whose life is in danger. It’s one of Robinson’s best thrillers.

Here’s a great suspense read from the UK that does everything right. Inspector Alan Banks and his team investigate the theft of a tractor from an area farm—an investigation that leads into a deeper mystery involving a murder, and the disappearance of a young man. Where some detective series tend to peter out and lose steam toward the end of the book, this page-turner keeps up the pace and delivers a very satisfying twist ending.