Allingham is the best of mystery writers

Always of the elect, Margery Allingham now towers above them

Don't start reading these books unless you are confident that you can handle addiction

Allingham was a contemporary of Agatha Christie but her work is thought by many to be more stylish and less pedestrian, with cunning plots and witty characters

This novel has the most amazing plot of any thriller I know... A startlingly good book

Even the Dead offers pleasures one doesn't always associate with the crime thriller. Like subtle characterisation and a calm, elegant prose style. What makes the novel stand out is the warm, sensitive, psychologically acute characterisation. When I reached the end of the novel, I had a sense of having been nourished, rather than manipulated. It just goes to show that it isn't the genre that counts, but the talent that a writer brings to it

In Even the Dead, Black goes beyond the atmospheric stage and scene setting, delving deeper than in any previous novel into the soul of his pathologist hero Quirke, an enigmatic loner whose voice colours every page as if staining it with nicotine

Step through The Gates of Evangeline with Charlotte Cates, a grief-stricken Northerner tasked with uncovering a Southern dynasty's dark secrets. Hair-raising and heart-rending, Hester Young's first novel is one of buried shame, children taken too soon, and, ultimately, of immense true love that binds across the mortal divide.

The hothouse atmosphere of Evangeline and the tortuous and tangled motives of its denizens make for an enjoyable puzzle box of a mystery. An eerie but inviting debut.

In Hester Young's haunted Louisiana, the ghostly labyrinth of the past opens its great doors to deliver up a lush gothic thriller. The Gates of Evangeline is a darkly marvelous debut, a classic whodunnit stitched with otherworldly chills.

A grieving mother but a determined journalist. What a box of mysteries this story is. Life, death, heartache and hope for the future. I loved it. Very much a book you don’t want to put down. A fabulous first novel. I hope this is the first of many, particularly if ‘Charlie Cates’ is involved.

Young’s The Gates of Evangeline is a stunning debut novel. A lyrical, haunting, heart-wrenching work of suspense with echoes of du Maurier, Hitchcock, and King.

Haunting, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful...Young handles the spectral elements with restraint as her tremendously sympathetic heroine seeks to build a new life after death.

A dreamy, Southern gothic mystery…Young’s novel is powerful and captivating.

A dangerously good thriller

This thriller gets under your skin and won't let you go. One thing is very clear at the end: we want to read more about Holger Munch and Mia Krüger!

A very sophisticated and terrifying thriller, which keeps the reader guessing and gasping to the very last page. The story is powerful, the style is fluent, and the cast of characters is simply irresistible