Kill Alex Cross is a thriller with family at its heart... Underneath the fast-and-furious action, Patterson is exploring what it means to be a father, a man and, ultimately, a human being in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.

It's no mystery why James Patterson is the world's most popular thriller writer: his uncanny skill in creating living, breathing characters we truly feel for and seamless, lightning-fast plots. I do this for a living, and he still manages to keep me guessing from the first to last page ... Simply put: Nobody does it better.

Behind all the noise and the numbers, we shouldn't forget that no one gets this big without amazing natural storytelling talent - which is what Jim has, in spades. The Alex Cross series proves it.

James Patterson is The Boss. End of.

I wrote, "Along Came a Spider is the best thriller I've come across in many a year. It deserves to be this season's no. 1 bestseller and should instantly make James Patterson a household name." A household name, indeed.

Every once in a while a writer comes along and fundamentally changes the way people read. He or she is so bright, so innovative, so industrious that what they envision and create becomes the measure by which all others are judged. In 1993 one such writer - James Patterson - began to do just that ... James Patterson is the gold standard by which all others are judged.

[Alex Cross] has become one of the greatest fictional detectives of all time, a character for the ages.

Alex Cross is a legend.

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.

In Harris's latest thriller Dr Alex Hoffman creates an algorithm that anticipates emotional effects on stock markets, but his life takes a dark turn when his mansion is burgled. Prepare for goosebumps.

Robert Harris is our literary Alfred Hitchcock. Just as the portly man with the voyeuristic mind for murder went for years under the label of "entertainer" before the brass plaque of "genius" was screwed onto his pediment, so Robert Harris is a "thriller writer", but in time his canon will be viewed as something far greater . . . What I so admire about Harris as a writer is the surface shine of his prose. It is muscular, utterly functional but still capable of poetry when necessary. George Orwell said that good writing was like a pane of glass through which the reader can see the action. With Harris, we get to see it in 3D.

Set on election day 2010, Robert Harris's latest novel is a combination of ripping yarn, political and historical verisimilitude and diligent research into a hither-to closed world.

A fine dystopian parable, especially impressive for the fact that instead of giving up on what really goes on in most banks and hedge funds and making them a mere back drop for money-laundering and ancillary skulduggery, as many thriller-writers have done, his heart of darkness is the thing itself. The drama contains, as he notes in the acknowledgments, "Gothic flights of fantasy" - the story reminiscent of everyone from Michael Crichton to Ian Fleming, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet there is an uncomfortable core of reality there . . . Quite a few Financial Time readers will, I suspect, not only savour The Fear Index, but wince with recognition.

Robert Harris's new novel The Fear Index races along as a thriller of high finance set during a single day: that of the Flash Crash. I have to obey spoiler-alert protocols at this point, because it is very hard to summarise what Harris so grippingly achieves through this material without letting some cats (Schrödinger's, perhaps?) out of the bag. So, if you prefer, look away now and read the book. You will do so very rapidly.

Harris wears his considerable research lightly. The prose is as crisp as ever, while the plotting accelerates at Hadron Collider pace.

For many of us, share prices are strings of dry, indecipherable figures ticking across hi-tech screens. But when stock markets tank, how quickly we become infected with the moist primal of emotions: sick confusion, clammy dread, coldest fear. Expertly mining this deep unease, Robert Harris's thriller presents a fictional nightmare that feels like a wake-up call . . . The novel has a sophistication that lift's beyond banker-bashing. Harris takes aim at a corrupted system from a moral and intellectual height that practically induces vertigo.

Imagine a computer that can hack into terrorist cells and air-traffic control, sniff out world disasters before they happen and cash in on the fear they generate. Marry this development by an American IT nerd to a smoothly British hedge-fund manager, and the result is untold riches . . . Robert Harris's first contemporary thriller since The Ghost, is an ingenious and vivid parable of our times.

The brief flicker of ambivalence about the period is stage-setting for a tour de force exercise in regenerating a classic. Taking a scenario as up-to-the-minute as a news flash from the money markets, The Fear Index gives it the scary features of Mary Shelley's 1818 shocker Frankenstein . . . Like Frankenstein, his novel is a tale of the catastrophic consequences of galvanising inanimate matter into uncontrollable life . . . The Fear Index is both cutting edge and keenly conscious of its literary predecessors. Reworking classic texts is a large-scale literary industry these days. Harris's tongue-in-cheek flesh-creeper (whose most chilling moments are its reminders of our present financial woes) is a virtuoso specimen of it.

Harris is a master of pace an entertainment, and The Fear Index is a thoroughly enjoyable book . . . Read the book. If I die tomorrow, blame the computer.

Like all Harris's books, this one is readily enjoyable as a suspense story . . . But what makes Harris's thrillers so much more rewarding than those of his rivals is that they all, whatever their ostensible subject, come out of his deep and expert interest in politics, broadly conceived - which is to say, in power, in how power is taken, held and lost; how some people are able to dominate others; how wealth and status, fear and greed, work . . .The Fear Index (which has a lot to say about the very rich - a group to which Harris himself now belongs but doesn't like) is ultimately a study in the total lack of morality of those who manipulate the markets . . . By focusing thus on a rogue algorithm and a pure scientist, Harris is not really fronting up the true authors of our current financial plight, perhaps. But, in its own carefully conceived terms, The Fear Index is certainly another winner.

This latest nail-biter from the author of The Ghost will keep fans of suspense up all night.

To crawl by bus through rush-hour traffic is not something that would normally appeal to a busy person. Unless, like me, that person was in possession of Robert Harris's new thriller The Fear Index. Then they would certainly relish the potential for escapism such a slow journey could provide and there was nowhere else I wanted to be then in that story, which delivers pure pleasure with every page.

Harris is a master of pace and entertainment, and The Fear Index is a thoroughly enjoyable book . . . Read the book.

The Fear Index is an escapist thriller to rank with the best of them, and as a guide to what hedge funds actually do, it is surprisingly clear and instructive.

There are moments when this book feels so up to date it could have been written next week... spookily exciting.

Perhaps the greatest thriller writer around, Harris has delivered his best work yet. A modern classic.

Mock-gothic variant on Frankenstein relates what happens when a computer programme goes rogue and ravages the money market. Suspense and satire combine in a book that is as up to the minute as a news flash.

If you didn’t catch it in hardback, grab it now in austerity-Britain paperback. Harris’s latest bestseller is a gripping, funny and timely tale of money – losing it or, more terrifyingly here, making too much of it… A high-speed plot, deft characterisation… and Harris even manages to explain what a hedge fund is.

Populist fiction at its best.

I would recommend The Fear Index. The writing is as elegant as ever.

Harris writes with a deceptively languid elegance, so that the novel straddles not only the crime and sci-fi genres but also that of literary fiction. A satisfying read on a number of levels, it is strongest as a character study of a man who discovers, pace Hemingway, the true meaning of the phrase "grace under pressure".

The Fear Index is a frightening book, of course, as, with its title, it intends. Harris has an excellent sense of pace, and understands as much about fear in literature as Hoffman does in markets.

Like Frankenstein, his novel is a tale of the catastrophic consequences of galvanising inanimate matter into uncontrollable life . . . The Fear Index is both cutting edge and keenly conscious of its literary predecessors. Reworking classic texts is a large-scale literary industry these days. Harris's tongue-in-cheek flesh-creeper (whose most chilling moments are its reminders of our present financial woes) is a virtuoso specimen of it.

Harris is a master of pace and entertainment, and The Fear Index is a thoroughly enjoyable book . . . Read the book. If I die tomorrow, blame the computer.

A nail-biting listen - the financial world has never seemed so thrilling - beautifully read by Phillip Franks

There is a cool edge to Franks' voice as he tracks Alex's surging paranoia to a blockbuster climax