The Calling

Cross has been producing unsettling, lyrical thrillers for over a decade, but has so far found more success writing for TV. ... This is a novelisation of Luther, the drama he devised and wrote for the BBC, and is the first in a projected series of stand-alone novels featuring agonised DCI John Luther, a big man with a big walk. A prequel, it shows us how Luther came to be so agonised by taking readers further into Mo Hayder territory than I for one wanted to go. Cross has always dealt in darkness and been so adept at conjuring bogeymen from the catacombs of mythology that you start to see them everywhere. The key murders in The Calling are so repulsive and their perpetrator so plausible that at times I had to force myself to keep reading. But I'm glad I did. -- John O'Connell, Guardian, Friday 12 August 2011