A skilful mix of ghost story and crime thriller...this book is outstanding. It crosses genres effortlessly and keeps all its balls in the air with consummate skill.

If you like Stieg Larsson, try a much better Swedish writer, Johan Theorin, whose first two books (Echoes from the Dead and The Darkest Room) are now available in English. Both self-contained and set on the Baltic island of Oland, both murder mysteries with a sense of the supernatural but explicable all the same

Penetrating, intelligent

Echoes from the Dead was rightly acclaimed in the UK, and this, his second, is even better. A powerful study of grief, loss and vulnerability, with a commendably earth-bound solution

Theorin builds the tension exquisitely

We could recognise her characters as easily as our colleagues if we saw them on the bus . . . an absorbing, portentfull depiction of Italian society, where superstition and old taboos still exert a powerful grip. Brunetti is in typically quizzical form. Shrewd yet appealingly emotional, he acts as a seductive guide to a country, and a city, depicted as slowly sinking under the weight of legal sleight-of-hand and pernicious networks of influence among the great and the good

A welcome addition to a hugely popular series with an unparalleled feel for the glorious city of Venice

Wonderful

Penelope Lively at her best, sharp-eyed but sympathetic, deftly steering the reader from one point of view to another. This novel should delight her regular readers and ensnare new ones

A very readable, well-paced novel peopled with Lively's customary immaculately observed and impeccably rounded characters

Lively skilfully mingles past and present, as she peels away the layers to uncover a family secret of which no one speaks...Lively's astute skewering of family relations reverberates in the mind long afterwards

Lively plays her sleight of hand with admirable dexterity. The dialogue is pitch-perfect, the writing crisp and the humour wonderfully dry

Gripping. An intelligent look at family relationships and the knock-on effects of past events on the present. It's an absorbing tale of mystery and intrigue that will leave you wondering what lies behind even the nicest façade

A deeply satisfying, eloquent family-fabric novel

It's the kind of stuff you should roll your eyes at, but it's too much fun to do anything but keep flipping pages to see where Bazell will take Peter next. And there are more pages yet to come, apparently; this is merely the first installment in a planned series, with a Leonardo DiCaprio-led movie also on the way. Read Beat the Reaper now, so you know what all the fuss is about later

Maybe not quite blown away so much as having my jaw drop to the floor on several occasions and having to endure the snap as it reconnected with the rest of my face. Beat the Reaper is like having a bucket of ice cold water poured over you - shocking, invigorating and certain to get your attention - but leaving you shivering and feeling a bit queasy after the initial assault on your senses is over

High octane thriller that moves along at a cracking pace

Fast, fun, furious, fierce...or better yet, stop reading the accolades for Beat the Reaper, open up to page one, and start reading. See you at the cash register

Outrageously funny ... This may be the most imaginative, albeit the most violent and profanity-laden, debuts of the new year ... If you don't like extreme gun violence, blow-by-blow descriptions of surgical procedures performed by doped-up, angry doctors, the lack of care administered by bitter nurses, misdiagnoses and a huge dose of vulgarity, this novel is not for you. If, however, you can take all of the above, you'll be treated to a story that gets at the heart of one man's immense loneliness and heartbreak. Be warned: One of the final scenes reaches new heights for gory. How then, you might ask, does this novel earn its comedic stripes? Bazell, a medical resident at the University of California, brings a Scrubs mind-set to his story and jacks it up to an outrageous level that will never be seen on network TV

An unusually talented writer...Genuinely entertaining...The story is so engaging that you don't want to be yanked out of it...Darkly comic...Bazell has a knack for breathing new life into the most timeworn genre conventions....The climax of Beat the Reaper finds Brown locked in a medical freezer waiting for his arch-nemesis to arrive and finish him off. The plan Brown concocts to save himself is the novel's most original flourish. It is also completely outrageous, so much so that I had to stop and think about whether I could really suspend my disbelief. In the end I decided that Bazell had more than earned my indulgence as a reader. If there's a better recommendation for a story than that, I don't know what it is

Suffering from Post-Holiday Stress Syndrome? Dr Josh Bazell has the prescription...he has written the first flat-out entertaining novel of 2009...It's an ingenious premise for a thriller, and Bazell pulls it off...Told with exquisite acerbic humour without sacrificing intrigue or tension...Beat the Reaper only gets better, turn by turn, page by page. Savvy and savagely diverting, it's a Tarantino movie made with Scorsese looking over his shoulder

[a] breakneck cross between a hospital drama, "The Godfather" and a Quentin Tarantino film

A propulsive, savvy read featuring characters both well shaded and shady, this debut thriller by a physician polymath with a BA in writing from Brown also offers the garnish du jour in the form of elaborate and funny footnotes (à la David Foster Wallace). You can prescribe this to fans of Carl Hiaasen and quirky abrasive fiction

[a] quirky and darkly humourous novel... Beat the Reaper is a wonderfully engaging novel that starts with a full-on beginning and doesn't let up until the end

This is the second funniest health care-based fiction to come out of the United States this year after the Republican Party's descriptions of the NHS