A meticulously researched act of reconstruction...The narrative, the dialogue and the intensity of Doig's emotions drive the story to a savage climax that reads like a modern thriller. It is the best sort of historical novel

Highly entertaining... superbly handled

Beautifully written, with baroque energy and style

Moves at a cracking pace with plenty of atmosphere and sympathy

Fleming finds an unencumbered, historically penetrating language in which the simplest expository sentences can bring prose, story and setting into a crisp and evocative alignment

This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who... bursts off the page

An extremely wintry and hard hitting adventure story...this is a historical evocation at times as powerful as the account of pre-1914 Berlin that the late great Sybille Bedford gave us in A Legacy..... readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest storytellers

Virile, ruthless, adventurous

'...a convincing, accurate thriller...this book is worth reading if only for the passage where the hero, Skelly, glimpses Osama Bin Laden at a public hanging; the scene both convinces and frightens'

Patterson boils a scene down to the single, telling detail, the element that defines a character or moves a plot along. It's what fires off the movie projector in the reader's mind.

Patterson knows where our deepest fears are buried... there's no stopping his imagination.

Patterson is in a class by himself.

[Patterson's] books don't pussyfoot around when it comes to the villains. These are bad, bad people ... with a lot of intrigue in high places.