Colour Her Dead Books in Order

This is best thought of as a loose two-book grouping rather than one continuous saga. Colour Her Dead and Midnight Hour are both early Celia Rees thrillers, but they do not depend on the same cast or a shared long plot. What they share is mood. Both are grounded suspense stories about young people caught close to danger, and both show how good Rees was from the start at turning familiar settings into places of real pressure.

Colour Her Dead is built around an old crime that never stopped echoing. Years after the murder of little Jennifer Beresford in the village of Coombe Ashleigh, Jude Hughes finds the beads Jenny wore on the day she died. What follows is part school project, part amateur investigation, and part slow uncovering of how a community carries its secrets. The pull here is not speed for its own sake. It is the way the past keeps leaning on the present.

Then Midnight Hour takes the fear somewhere more immediate and exposed.

That novel shifts toward celebrity, obsession, and stalking. Blair Paige is famous, used to attention, and suddenly dealing with the fact that admiration can become something much darker. The threat is not hidden in distant history this time. It is active, personal, and closing in. Where Colour Her Dead feels like a village mystery with aftershocks, Midnight Hour is sharper and more direct, built around the nightmare of being watched.

What links the two books is Rees's interest in human menace. These are not fantasy novels, and the fear does not depend on magic. Instead, she focuses on guilt, secrecy, obsession, and the point where ordinary curiosity becomes dangerous. Teenagers in her hands are rarely passive. They ask questions, make mistakes, push too far, and sometimes end up seeing more than adults would like them to see.

There is also a clear sense of Rees learning the craft she would later use in bigger books. She likes alternating pressure points, tense reveals, and the way a young person's viewpoint can make danger feel immediate. Even when the plots are quite different, the emotional current is similar. Somebody knows more than they are saying. Somebody is being watched. Somebody is carrying the cost of an older wrong.

So if you are coming to this page, expect two early suspense novels that can be read in either order. One is a past-and-present murder mystery. The other is a stalking thriller. Together they show the side of Rees that is interested less in ghosts than in the much nearer fear of what people do to each other, and what happens when a teenager decides to stop looking away.