[6] In the crime novels that followed -- Return from the Ashes, The Road to Hell, Prisoner of Love and others — he established himself as a master of psychological suspense with a very personal style, showing great imagination in his choice of themes and plot twists.
In the 1976 novel Sophie ou les Galanteries exemplaires, for the first time, Monteilhet set his story in a distant past – the 18th century.
In 1981, he briefly ventured into the science fiction genre with Les Queues de Kallinaos, both a philosophical tale in the style of Pierre Boulle and a tragedy of paternal love pushed to extremes.
[7] He explored his gastronomic preoccupations in the witty crime thrillers La Part des anges (1992), Œdipe en Médoc (1993), Étoiles filantes (1994), and Le Taureau par les cornes (1994).
The writer returns to this technique in Murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair (1975) where the narrative is presented as alternating entries in the diaries of the two protagonists, and the same event is often depicted from two contrasting points of view.
Jean Tulard remarks that Monteilhet is "the only author, or almost the only one, who cares to write and use all the resources of literature: correspondence, personal diary, interior monologue, press clippings... to punctuate his narrative.
His first novel The Praying Mantises brought comparisons with Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, due to the use of the epistolary form, and the cruelty and amorality of the characters.