The Knives reviewed in the Financial Times: 'Thrilling in the truest sense.'

Dan Mitchell's art for the FT review of The Knives

This weekend's Financial Times brought a great boon: a very gratifying review of The Knives by the critic and author Erica Wagner, who clearly read the book as closely as any novelist could hope for and was also kind enough to name-check my earlier novel Crusaders (2008).

The FT also allotted a generous space and positioning to Wagner's piece and illustrated it with a drawing by Dan Mitchell that very adroitly projects the menace suggested in the titling of the review: Ministry of Fear.

Some choice extracts:

'The current political climate, with reality giving fiction a run for its money, is one in which the jaded reader might be hard to impress. Which makes Richard T Kelly’s The Knives all the more admirable... This is a sharp and engaging tale...Kelly makes lives the reader can believe in. Novels are thrilling in the truest sense when they feel as if they are built of flesh and blood; it’s Kelly’s success in doing so that makes his final twist of the knife even more shocking.'