Carol Starkey, protagonist of Robert Crais's new thriller Demolition Angel, has been as badly damaged by life as any whisky-soaked gumshoe; a bad moment three years ago cost her her lover, her physical confidence and the job on the LA Bomb Squad that she loved. When a former colleague is killed by an ingenious trap, and Pell, an obsessed federal agent, tells her about Mr Red, who blows people up for profit, but kills bomb technicians for fun, she knows that her path back to sanity lies through this case. With the attractive but secretive Pell as her guide, she explores an underworld where both she and Mr Red are fan fetishes, online chat rooms where his best killings and her best defusings are equally the currency of conversation and where she and Mr Red start a dangerous flirtation. This is perhaps the most suspenseful novel of the year--the demons that haunt Pell and Carol, the hair triggers and high explosives and dangerous minds, all combine in sequence after sequence of nail-biting intensity. From beginning to end, Crais continues to deliver, and to take nerve-wracking excitement--particularly in his almost outrageously intense final climax--further than ever before. --Roz Kaveney