A page-turner

Hugely enjoyable

Hugely enjoyable... This is a satisfying crime story and a fearless examination of controversial issues surrounding terminal illness

The Betrayal of Trust isn't only a page-turner - though it certainly fulfils that expectation - it's also a thought-provoking novel about those who suffer and those who care for them

Hill can't write a bad sentence and her characters are all completely convincing - no more so than her long-serving detective Simon Serrailler

Her intellectual stance is engaging, her plot unpredictable and her detective a likeable presence

Far more than a whodunit...written with a novelist's flair, in that the characters, however fleeting, are carefully drawn and believable

A crime series that specialises in sidestepping conventions, always to exhilarating effect... These books succeed in harnessing all the genre's addictive power while maintaining a complexity and fascination entirely their own

Susan Hill's Serrailler novels are a real treat

An excellent next instalment and an absorbing novel

Susan Hill is to be congratulated on her tour de force: a novel rather more serious than a superior page-turner, though it is that as well. All us all, a highly commendable performance, thoughtful, uncomfortable, and worthy of our undivided attention

What one is aware of throughout is Hill's keen intelligence, the range of her sympathy and her depth of moral concern...reading these novels which combine good plots with well-drawn characters and intelligent probing of the way we live now, is so enriching

It is when Hill descends to write about mere mortals...that one remembers she is among our finest novelists

Beautifully drawn characters

Not all great novelists can write crime fiction but when one like Susan Hill does the result is stunning

A well-crafted crime novel… Hill writes so clearly, and the plot is so well put together, that you can't help gobbling it up

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