With this captivating novel, the reigning queen of crime fiction establishes that an unsolved murder is not a necessary ingredient of a suspense-filled mystery ... Her deft sculpturing of characters' idiosyncratic obsessions and foibles betrays a shrewdness of perception of which even the absent Wexford would be proud.

A roundabout of characters is set whirling along in an irresistibly readable, tragi-comic carnival. Dr Johnson's dictum could be amended here: the reader who is tired of Ruth Rendell's novel of London is tired of life

Impossible to put down ... Rendell, at her most sardonic here, may view all her characters as creatures who live under stones but it is her sense of place that counts. She makes you smell the excitement and desperation. Portobello is as brilliant as anything she has ever written

Ruth Rendell is marvellous at psychological tension ... Rendell is too clever and too accomplished to serve up the expected. She supplies a satisfying, rather low-key ending in which she knits all the threads together with a casual flourish that shows veteran expertise

A thriller steeped in psychological intrigue ... Rendell's prose style is as succinct and accessible as ever

Portobello is Ruth Rendell in a quiet mood with an absorbing story about strange inhabitants of Portobello Road market in London and it's Notting Hill environs... the various misfits, with their eccentricities, interact as only Rendell can manipulate. She portrays the Portobello area, a melting-pot home to the poor and the posh, with harsh, realistic affection bordering on the elegiac.

Portobello is a rich and quirky picture of one of the most idiosyncratic areas of London ... Rendell's evocation of Notting Hill and Portobello Road market is one of her most vivid realisations ... Admirers of Rendell will quickly realise that Portobello demonstrates a markedly different approach to her previous books. The eccentricities and grotesqueries of the characters here are drawn very large; too large, in fact, to be confined within the parameters of the standard crime novel. However, if Portobello breaks out of that particular category, it is none the worse for it

In the bustling souk of Portobello Road, three characters with very different lives are brought together by Fate, greed and curiosity ... each is brought to life with expert strokes, as is this chaotic, restless, deeply divided part of London. Their lives collide dangerously, almost fatally, in an intense, compelling tale, and the resolution is oddly unsettling.

Rendell's take on Notting Hill restores some of the rawness taken away by gentrification and the saccharine stammer of the film of the same name, tapping into its former reputation for slum landlords, racial tension and nasty cops

Ruth Rendell excels in the creation of dread by bringing together disturbed psyches with the contingent and coincidental

Next to the dross that pours from the publishing industry under the 'thriller' heading, a truly well-written, multi-dimensional book with pulse and form becomes a gem of the highest order. So it's always a treat when the master of her genre comes out with a new one

A fiction whose effect on the reader is almost as addictive as the slimming sweets on which Eugene becomes so disturbingly dependent

Ruth Rendell's sense of place and disdain for her characters elevates a sordid case of arson into an artful exploration of sinister self-delusion

She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops - and above all about its inhabitants ... As ever Rendell writes with wry and witty authority ... It's intelligent stuff, and very readable

Rendell is marvellous at psychological tension, and the suspicion that these ways will be sinister is what hooks the reader. Setting out her cast with conviction, she unrolls their lives at a stately, ominous pace

Psychologically acute and extremely disturbing, Ruth Rendell's work is outstanding

Rendell has a Dickensian empathy, informed by a prodigious love of London life. Her account, bursting with colour and vitality, is a treat to read