Fred Vargas ... is rapidly asserting herself as one of the most impressive working crime writers

Stylish prose and strong characters

Irresistibly gripping, powerfully written and quite often frightening

The fascination of Fred Vargas's books is due as much to her characters as her plots... sit back and enjoy

If you haven't cottoned on to Vargas's brilliant Adamsberg detective stories, you're missing a treat

Vargas's latest continues on the humorous and original eccentricity of her work

Child has perfected Reacher's controlled, spare tone... as always, there's lots of bonecrunching and nose-smashing, yet the violence never feels gratuitous

This haunting, stand-alone novel is a subtler work than Child's previous output and offers a sensitively handled romantic sub-plot to boot

It's a testament to Lee Child's superb story-telling skills that... the interest doesn't flag for an instant... Like Reacher, Child doesn't do things by halves

Gripping and addictive... Reacher's stripped-down life is echoed by Lee Child's lean and spare prose

One of the genre's most enduring heroes. Tough, solitary, righteous and incorruptible, [Reacher] harks back to another great fictional detective, Philip Marlowe

A new Jack Reacher novel arrives as the year's first red-hot beach book... the success of these books rests partly on the big, hulking shoulders of their charismatic hero... one of the most enduring action heroes on the American landscape

Reacher fans will love it - it's all storming compounds, breaking hearts and not bothering to take names, taking justice into his own hands and to hell with the wos'name... a solid inter-Bond-film substitute

If you like a psychological riddle, then this book is for you

It's the kind of stuff you should roll your eyes at, but it's too much fun to do anything but keep flipping pages to see where Bazell will take Peter next. And there are more pages yet to come, apparently; this is merely the first installment in a planned series, with a Leonardo DiCaprio-led movie also on the way. Read Beat the Reaper now, so you know what all the fuss is about later

Maybe not quite blown away so much as having my jaw drop to the floor on several occasions and having to endure the snap as it reconnected with the rest of my face. Beat the Reaper is like having a bucket of ice cold water poured over you - shocking, invigorating and certain to get your attention - but leaving you shivering and feeling a bit queasy after the initial assault on your senses is over

High octane thriller that moves along at a cracking pace

Fast, fun, furious, fierce...or better yet, stop reading the accolades for Beat the Reaper, open up to page one, and start reading. See you at the cash register

Outrageously funny ... This may be the most imaginative, albeit the most violent and profanity-laden, debuts of the new year ... If you don't like extreme gun violence, blow-by-blow descriptions of surgical procedures performed by doped-up, angry doctors, the lack of care administered by bitter nurses, misdiagnoses and a huge dose of vulgarity, this novel is not for you. If, however, you can take all of the above, you'll be treated to a story that gets at the heart of one man's immense loneliness and heartbreak. Be warned: One of the final scenes reaches new heights for gory. How then, you might ask, does this novel earn its comedic stripes? Bazell, a medical resident at the University of California, brings a Scrubs mind-set to his story and jacks it up to an outrageous level that will never be seen on network TV

An unusually talented writer...Genuinely entertaining...The story is so engaging that you don't want to be yanked out of it...Darkly comic...Bazell has a knack for breathing new life into the most timeworn genre conventions....The climax of Beat the Reaper finds Brown locked in a medical freezer waiting for his arch-nemesis to arrive and finish him off. The plan Brown concocts to save himself is the novel's most original flourish. It is also completely outrageous, so much so that I had to stop and think about whether I could really suspend my disbelief. In the end I decided that Bazell had more than earned my indulgence as a reader. If there's a better recommendation for a story than that, I don't know what it is

Suffering from Post-Holiday Stress Syndrome? Dr Josh Bazell has the prescription...he has written the first flat-out entertaining novel of 2009...It's an ingenious premise for a thriller, and Bazell pulls it off...Told with exquisite acerbic humour without sacrificing intrigue or tension...Beat the Reaper only gets better, turn by turn, page by page. Savvy and savagely diverting, it's a Tarantino movie made with Scorsese looking over his shoulder

[a] breakneck cross between a hospital drama, "The Godfather" and a Quentin Tarantino film

A propulsive, savvy read featuring characters both well shaded and shady, this debut thriller by a physician polymath with a BA in writing from Brown also offers the garnish du jour in the form of elaborate and funny footnotes (à la David Foster Wallace). You can prescribe this to fans of Carl Hiaasen and quirky abrasive fiction

[a] quirky and darkly humourous novel... Beat the Reaper is a wonderfully engaging novel that starts with a full-on beginning and doesn't let up until the end

This is the second funniest health care-based fiction to come out of the United States this year after the Republican Party's descriptions of the NHS