Like her acclaimed The Woman in Black, Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture (Profile, £9.99) is a gothic tale that reveals dark shadows lurking beneath ordinary life.

One bitter winter's night, Oliver visits his old tutor in his Cambridge rooms. He tells of a dark secret hidden within the glowing 18th-century painting depicting a Venetian carnival in which a man stares out from among masked revellers with an expression of astonishment and fear.

Each successive visitor is mesmerised, then repelled, by the figure in the picture. As the sense of foreboding increases, the story centres on a jilted woman obsessed by jealousy. Like The Picture of Dorian Gray, the fascination resides between life and art, beauty and horror.

Synchronisation is often the way in the literary world. A recent book, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, by Laura Thompson, is published simultaneously with two new novels, each imbued with the spirit of our famous detective writer.

Mary Tant, in her first Christie-style classic murder mystery, The Rossington Inheritance (Threshold, £12.99), gathers a small group of polite characters in a rundown Tudor mansion and ruined Cistercian priory in the West Country. It has been owned by the Rossington family for generations, and smuggling is endemic.

Young botanist Lucy planned to study plants in Peru but decided instead to help her brother Will and her grandmother with moneymaking schemes, against the advice of Graham, their conservative estate manager, who distrusts her friends.

There is Hugh, an expert on birds, books and old buildings, and Simon, a potter and metal detector who dreams of finding treasure in the priory. In Christie tradition, murder ensues, followed by a tense denouement.

A Mysterious Affair of Style (Faber, £12.99), the sequel to The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, is a "loving homage" by Gilbert Adair to Agatha Christie, playing on her original title The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Set in 1946, it features the effervescent mystery novelist Evadne Mount, who "spent 20 years blithely killing off her characters" with the help of her old partner, the plodding Inspector Trubshaw.

Now Evadne is once more involved in suspicious death: the great film director Farjeon (bearing a striking resemblance to Hitchcock) and his young protégé. Things get even hotter when Evadne's dearest friend, the actress Cora, is murdered on the film set in front of the usual suspects. Adair moves Christie's habitual milieu from the country house to the bright lights of Piccadilly, the Ritz and the Pictures' with great aplomb and elegance.