100 books like House of Storm

Gaudy Night is one of several books featuring Harriet Vane, a mystery writer who first meets detective Lord Peter Wimsey while on trial for allegedly poisoning her lover. Set in a fictional Oxford women’s college, the story involves threatening letters, escalating vandalism, and violence.

Harriet is an educated professional. She is notorious due to scandal. She is trying to balance her independence in the 1930s and her romance with Peter. She is conflicted about whether her future should involve marriage and children.

This book is both a detective story, and a novel about the work-life balance struggles faced by women. Can Harriet “have it all” on her own terms? With the respect of the right partner, and a knowledge of her own mind, needs, and desires, it’s definitely worth trying.

It is World War Two in England. In Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman a small group of people has been invited to a country house. One of them is killed. The remoteness of the house contributes to the limited group of people as possible killers, making it a classic closed-group story. It’s a good mystery. It also offers a thought-provoking contrast to the real-world event raging at the time, for in the book an English woman is saved by the German doctor. Marsh is not pro-Axis. She’s merely showing our universal dependency on each other to get through a terrifying situation. I loved this idea and thought it quite brilliant of Marsh. And something I think is rather unique in mystery novels.

This book concerns vacationers at a small hotel in the Scottish Hebrides. A murder is committed. Due to the island and the hotel’s remoteness, the location creates a closed community. Everyone has reasons to be annoyed with others, adding tension and motives for murder. I particularly like the enveloping mood of the wild mountains and fog. Radio broadcasts of real-life events (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation preparations and Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb of Mount Everest) add a strange link to the outside world for this group of isolated hotel guests. I felt it also underscored the contrast between their forced solitude and stay at the hotel as opposed to Elizabeth and Hillary’s freedom to do what they wished.

Brand’s Green for Danger is another closed group mystery, this time the suspects are the medical staff at a small, rural military hospital. Medical and hospital staff live there, so outsiders are very few.  It’s World War Two in England, during the blitz. Bombs are dropping, lights are going off and on, and it’s during an operation that a person is murdered. Later in the story, a nurse is killed. I liked being plunged into the hospital community, getting to know them, and seeing what their lives are like during the war. I liked the feeling of remoteness to this closed group, as well as the overall tension and urgency that the war and the blitz add: solve the murders before a third one might happen!

John Banville writes like the Booker Prize winner he is.

Set in remote Ireland in 1957, this book made me glad my ancestors got out of there when they did!

I enjoyed the contrast between the secretive Catholic villagers and the tough, pragmatic detective, a Protestant. I saw my relatives in this moody book.

Think Rentaghost, but with a dead, sulky teenager running the show.

I read this for review and I loved this book so much. It’s great fun and sassy as hell, and the deaths – and the dead – are very well written.

A play on the classic country house mystery, Grave Expectations pulls together nods to true crime and to clairvoyance, adding a dash of modern pop culture. 

This one is actually a bit of a cheat as it’s not really set at Christmas, although it is suitably snowy. In fact, it was originally published as “Another Little Murder” but has been renamed by canny publishers. I’ve included it anyway because it is such a fun book and, with its isolated, country-house setting, it certainly feels cosy enough for this time of year.

Published in 1947, it features an exceptionally likable detective called Dilys Hughes. She’s a witty, quirky, and determined protagonist who finds herself at the wonderfully named manor of Wintry Wold, just in time to investigate the death of its elderly owner. With its light touch and plenty of banter, it’s far closer to modern “cozy” whodunits than gritty, hard-boiled fiction. A really fun read to devour before Christmas arrives.

This is an amazing book that serves as a template for academic writers seeking to reach a wider readership. Flanders delves into not only Victorian Britain’s obsessive fascination with homicide and its detection, but also how newspaper editors and reporters, playwrights, and novelists benefited from and were influenced by particularly gruesome crimes with compelling victims and perpetrators. The book incorporates academic scholarship and recalls some of the most famous crimes of the era and explores their impact on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other cultural producers.   

Another Christie, out of a handful of books Dame Agatha wrote set on trains. Much as I like Poirot, I love Jane Marple, the quiet spinster from St. Mary Mead who knits, knows everyone, and is well-schooled in human nature and foibles. Talk about powers of observation. In this classic, Miss Marple’s friend Mrs. Elspeth McGillicuddy is traveling by train. At a moment when two trains are traveling side by side on different tracks, she looks out the window of her compartment and sees a man strangling a woman. The railway authorities don’t believe her—quelle surprise! With no other witnesses, no suspects, and no corpse, who will believe her? Jane Marple, of course, who has a plan to out the killer.

I just did a reread of this timed for the release of the seventh in the series, and every time I read it I’m blown away by the genius way Thomas deconstructs the Holmes mythology and then puts it back together again in a new, fascinating, plausible, entirely satisfying way.

In this retelling Holmes is not only a woman, but one who has been exiled from society for—well, behaving like Sherlock Holmes. The characterization—not only of Holmes, but also of her family, associates, and enemies—is rich and believable, and the mysteries are complex and gripping.

The whole series explores the fundamental injustice of women being treated differently from men, as well as the many ingenious ways women find to escape, avoid, and subvert that norm—and the price they pay.