Sheehan handles the courtroom stuff like a pro, dragging us through cross-examinations and procedural challenges with deftly hewn dialogue.

Sheehan has written an outstanding legal debut full of rich characters. Full marks!

Sheehan's book is a powerful polemic against the American legal system and above all against the death penalty.

Slaughter ... brings the story to a shattering climax

Wildly readable... [Slaughter] has been compared to Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell, and for once the hype is justified ... deftly craf ted, damnably suspenseful and, in the end, deadly serious ... Slaughter 's plotting is brilliant, her suspense relentless

Unsparing, exciting, genuinely alarming ... excellent handling of densely woven plot, rich in interactions, well characterised and as subt le as it is shrewd ... A formidable debut

An extraordinary debut ... Slaughter has created a ferociously taut and terrifying story which is, at the same time, compassionate and real. I defy anyone to read it in more than three sittings

Wildly readable...Blindsighted hits the bull's eye.

An unflinching suspense thriller . . . Blindsighted is a promising debut, and Karin Slaughter is a novelist to watch

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