Intensely readable. A tale of personal horror, thrills and vengeance

Dick Francis's fiction has a secret ingredient - his inimitable knack of grabbing the reader's attention on page one and holding it tight until the very end

Francis writing at his best

One of the most popular crime writers of our time

By far the best writer of police mysteries today

The novels become a compulsion - one reads them all

The most original crime writer of our time

James Ellroy is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world

Without him and his crime fiction, there's no David Peace or The Sopranos or Ian Rankin or The Wire or the work of countless writers and film makers who saw a different way of doing things when they first cracked the spine on an Ellroy

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north