The Holy Thief – Reviews
“Ryan’s stately style belies the page-turning quality of the novel”
Irish Times
“Ryan writes with narrative drive and urgency, a good sense of place and a central character who is conflicted, moral and above all likeable: whodunnit heaven.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Ryan can really write — an elegant, evocative English that savours each scene while propelling the action unerringly onwards … there’s much to admire and absorb in this excellent and exciting first novel.”
Irish Independent
“Impressive…. Ryan, who merits comparison to Tom Rob Smith, makes palpable the perpetual state of fear of being reported as disloyal, besides dramatizing the difficulty of being an honest cop in a repressive police state. Readers will hope Korolev has a long career ahead of him.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Such details make “The Holy Thief” … one of the year’s most exciting mysteries”
Sun Sentinel
“This debut is a powerful tale set in 1930s Russia … it’s atmospheric, beautifully written and meticulously researched.”
Irish Examiner
“The mystery at the heart of The Holy Thief is intriguing … but it is Ryan’s details of life in the bad old USSR that make the story so engrossing.”
Irish Times
“Plunges the reader into an atmospherically conjured 1930′s Moscow”
The Independent
“It’s a tough, suspenseful premise for a debut, contrasting claustrophobic atmosphere with personal optimism in a way that can only intensify as the series continues.”
Financial Times
“Set in a vividly imagined Stalinist Russia, where the creeping paranoia of a surveillance state blends perfectly with the brutal serial murders”
Metro
“Ryan’s novel has an authority that belies his first-novel status… Ryan demonstrates considerable skill in evoking this benighted period, along with a deftness at ringing the changes on familiar crime plotting moves.The auguries for a series, of which The Holy Thief is the first book, are very promising indeed.”
Daily Express
“impressive debut.”
Saturday Times Review
“excellently-observed characters who exist in a nightmarish world of fear, suspicion and danger. Ryan skillfully captures the reality of life in the most spied-upon society in history…The Holy Thief is an impressive debut from Ryan. It pulls off the difficult task of laying down ample foundations for a scheduled subsequent series without burdening its narrative drive with excessive back-story detail. I look forward to Captain Korolev’s further exploits under the cold gaze of Comrade Stalin.”
Yorkshire Evening Post
“Fans of Phillip Kerr, Tom Rob Smith, and Olen Steinhauer have a treat in store with this strong period thriller from British debut author Ryan . . .A series to watch very closely”
Irish Examiner
“A first novel written with all the narrative assurance of someone who’d been perfecting his art for years. A thriller set amid the paranoia of 1930s Moscow, it was persuasive in all its local and historical details, told its tense story with style and aplomb and had an engagingly troubled hero”
Books of the year, Irish Independent
“Remarkable thriller . . . In his solitude and resolve, Ryan’s Korolev evokes Martin Cruz Smith’s fierce Arkady Renko, while the period detail and gore call to mind Tom Rob Smith”
Library Journal
“Ryan’s research, and the genuine feel he has for the unique place and time, made The Holy Thief an especially good read.”
Ellery Queen Magazine
A good review from Rob Kitchin:
http://theviewfromthebluehouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/holy-thief-by-william-ryan-mantle-2010.html
And another from Dorothy James’ My Place for Mystery
http://myplaceformystery.com/2011/04/28/review-of-william-ryans-the-holy-thief/
