The best detective in fiction...Dupin is unrivalled

Poe's blackly ingenious tale of brutal murder in 19th-century Paris establishes C. Auguste Dupin, a man of 'peculiar analytic ability', as the model for pretty much every intellectual detective to come

For their supernatural grotesquerie and graveyard doom,[Poe's stories] foreshadow Stephen King and the "southern gothic" of Truman Capote... his work continues to enthral. His greatest tales radiate a dark humour and mockery that strike an oddly modern note.

If genius is an exceptional capacity for imaginative creation, Poe had it in spades. With Dupin in The Murders In The Rue Morgue, he created the first detective story before the word 'detective' existed

The modern horror novel owes an enormous debt to Poe, and the novel of psychological horror owes him almost everything

Thanks to Poe, we now have a Protector yet more powerful, a figure we can take to our hearts, or into our subconsciousnesses: the Great Detective.

If you love thrillers, you have to read these stories.

Famed for his macabre tales of Gothic suspense, Poe actually invented the detective fiction genre in 1841 with the creation of his brilliant Partisan investigator Auguste Dupin.

Gabaldon is a born storyteller

History comes deliciously alive on the page

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