Perhaps the most cleverly constructed and incendiary thriller I've ever read. The great books in this genre take you on an emotional roller-coaster, but the best, like this one, also have you trampling through a moral minefield.

Niven is a deft writer who pumps unease like gas into the space between what Donnie was and what he has become…[a] gripping piece of work.

[Niven has] a depth and empathy for his characters that few modern thrillers can match…The pace, dialogue and narrative voice are all pitch-perfect, and the flashback scenes of Donnie’s childhood are frighteningly realistic. Niven proves himself expert at creating a sense of foreboding, and when all Donnie’s worst fears come to pass, the author clearly uses his own experience as an occasional screenwriter to ramp up the tension to almost unbearable levels. A thriller that delivers on every level, Cold Hands is a fantastic change of style and pace for Niven.

A heart-racing page-turner of redemption and retribution... The book's twists and turns come to a cinematic, savage climax and it seems destined to join John's other books and be bought up for the big screen.

Cold Hands is certainly one of the year’s smartest thrillers, as well as its most blood-soaked.

Deeply, intelligently satirical… Niven provides hilarious, perceptive entertainment

An intense, breath-taking read... a tense thriller designed to keep the reader turning the pages long after bedtime; at its core, a character who does not necessarily deserve our sympathies, but who receives them nonetheless... Cold Hands is John Niven’s first foray into crime/thriller territory (hence the addition of the middle initial), and shows a writer who is more than up to the task... From its slow beginnings to its violent and blood-spattered conclusion, Cold Hands is a good old-fashioned thriller. With a handful of twists designed to keep the reader on their toes, Niven’s first thriller is an intense and gripping examination of one man’s determination to protect his family from a past he has long forgotten. This is thriller writing at its best, and John J. Niven is definitely one to watch in a genre that can, at times, suffer from saturation of offerings.

A gut-wrenching debut...This thriller announces the arrival of a tremendous new talent...It drives the breath from your body with its pace, suspense and enveloping horror...Terrifying and mysterious. Superbly told and achingly sad, this book grabs your heart strings and threatens to tear them out.

Niven’s debut on the thriller scene is ridiculously, disturbingly compelling.

Well-written, tense and with some very nasty images, this isn’t Niven’s first book…, but it is his first thriller, and…a good one.

Brilliantly written, Cold Hands is that rarest of things – a gripping thriller with real depth. An intense, exhilarating adrenaline rush, I found myself staying up all night to finish it in one sitting. Wonderful.

Gripping and disturbing

One of the most courageous literary endeavours of recent times … Perfidia is a crime novel but mainly in the sense that it investigates deeper than before the ultimate crime of war, and the meta-crime that is society itself … Perfidia is a brave and moral book. It is not a beautiful book. Its defining characteristic is honesty, its engine principle, qualities that are vanishingly rare in contemporary fiction. It may be set in the 1940s, at a very specific and not so very distant moment in historical time, but its real subject is now.

Master of the sharp, snarling, spare sentence James Ellroy kicks off another mighty four-book run…A bloody big read but every word’s made to count at gunpoint. Ellroy kicks ass all round the ballpark.

Perfidia is a brilliant, breakneck ride. Nobody except James Ellroy could pull this off. He doesn't merely write - he ignites and demolishes.

A war novel like no other…“Dark desires sizzle” and explode with a furious climax. Ellroy is not only back in form – he’s raised the stakes.

One of the most original and daring writers alive.

It’s an epic 687-page undertaking that is at times disturbingly violent – a must for noir fans.

Ellroy, writing in his signature telegraphic style, strives to depict reality, every dark aspect of it: there’s murder, apparent ritual suicides, hate crimes and a world of characters that you just cannot root for. Ellroy successfully establishes his four main characters, alongside a wealth of fully developed, clever and sophisticated secondary characters, within his own creation of a microcosm of a community challenged by politics and an unavoidable history.

James Ellroy is the best crime writer in the world.

A brash, two-fisted tour-de-force of spleen and invective which holds up a cracked and tarnished mirror to a turbulent period of American history … powerful in scope, theme and character … for blood and guts, he could give Beowulf a run for its money … it is impossible to deny the power and energy that has gone into Perfidia, which is more than a crime novel whilst showing, at the same time, what the crime novel is capable of.

The prose is as tight and fast moving as ever … If you are in pursuit of vintage Ellroy, this book is for you.

A sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity.

As unflinching and sharp as ever, even more so . . . Perfidia might be his [Ellroy’s] finest novel yet . . . Its story is full of tectonic movements, fascinating and dangerous characters with ambiguous morality, and events bigger than life itself. It’s brilliant in its complexity and vastness.

As abrasive and compelling as always.