"Tightly crafted … less a traditional catch-him-if-you-can crime caper and more a psychological probe into a pathological mind. Rather than cliff-hangers or plot twists, it’s the pulsating inner zeal of this nihilistic 19-year-old that gives the book its verve…. The author’s background has provided him with rich pickings to portray China, both in the grim, claustrophobic poverty of rural life and later in the corrupt actions of the lawyers and police.... A PERFECT CRIME may be anchored in Chinese society, but its existential crisis is universal. "
—Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore in The Wall Street Journal

"A former police officer who writes from experience, A Yi excels in his vivid, sordid portrait of contemporary China. It's a heartbreaking tale of a rotten, alienated society fueled by greed - a nation in moral crisis."
—South China Morning Post

"A terrifying, technically flawless account of moral darkness within the contemporary People's Republic, by one of mainland China's most accomplished and promising young novelists."
—Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China

“A Yi is one of the most gifted Chinese authors in recent times.”
—Nobel Prize winning poet, Bei Dao

"This impressively nasty account of a motiveless murder could well be said to mark a fiendishly clever point where Albert Camus nods benignly to Bret Easton Ellis.... It is as much about the society in which it takes place as it is about the killer or the crime.”
—The Irish Times

"A Yi's isolated narrator is equal parts calculating monster and forsaken victim: deserted, neglected, and ignored, he finds that his only means of feeling alive is to engender death. This austere English PEN Award winner offers an exponentially more chilling alternative to the plethora of dystopic titles; fans of Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Fuminori Nakamura, and even Keigo Higashino will surely find resonating, realistic terror here."
—Library Journal

"Yi, a former police officer, is slowly rising to prominence on the literary scene in China, where this novel was published in 2011. It seems a commentary on both the culture and on the amorality and emotional detachment of one individual in it. "
—Booklist