Noir in a nutshell

A sleek, saturnine thriller

A top-drawer mystery

The novel has three great strengths. The first is Waldo Lydecker, the vain, deliciously nasty newspaper columnist ...Its second strength is an ingenious plot twist ...The third is Caspary's having set a noirish crime story in the Manhattan haute monde of ad agencies, fancy restaurants and society folk as odious as they are self-satisfied

Twists and turns give the plot its space, and hard-bitten cop Mark McPherson its hero

Dead clever and occasionally macabre… Intricately plotted, proper wince-inducing stuff… A cutting-edge, vital new British novel for now

Highly recommended… First Novel is a clever book, but as well as having brains it has guts: it begins slowly but soon acquires the characteristics of a thriller, and the ending is a revelation

Only a man with prodigious talent, not to mention a capacity for multi-tasking, would even attempt a book of such monumental ambition… Far too good to be a debut. Which, of course, it isn’t.This is a novel that demands to be read more than once.

I began by simply enjoying the novel and ended up being thrilled, horrified, disturbed. First Novel is absolutely at the forefront of everything I’ve read in British fiction over the last couple of years.

A crafty puzzler that folds the Shipman murders into the tale of a no-mark writing tutor with a fetish for car sex under the Manchester flight path.

Blurs fact and fiction with aplomb… Royle’s novel is a sharp portrait of a man going very wrong.

Extremely good.

Dazzling… Royle attended last year’s Man Booker Prize ceremony as editor of one of the shortlisted titles, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse… I wouldn’t bet against Royle having to dry-clean the tux on his own account next time.

Royle’s coup is to deliver the pithy sting of a good short story many times over the course of a whole novel.

I admired it so much and wanted to go back and see how it was all put together. His book absolutely enchanted me.

This may be a tricksily metafictional novel but Royle hasn’t forgotten his readers.

5 stars, gripping, innovative and fluent.

Nicholas Royle has produced the holy grail: a literary page-turner. Although it’s published in January, I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make the short list of many a prize at the end of the year.

A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

A vertiginous murder mystery with echoes of JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet

A brilliant, eerie mix of campus meta-novel, whodunnit, failed-love story and existential contemplation

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

An ingenious tale

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original