The Smiling Man: (Aidan Waits)

‘Gritty as hell. I loved it. A great urban cop thriller’ Ian Rankin As heard on BBC Radio 5 Live Phil Williams Show 'Talents such as Knox rarely emerge more than once in a generation. A crime fiction masterpiece' ***** Metro 'Packing a punch from the very first page. You will love The Smiling Man' Jane Harper, author of The Dry From the bestselling author of Sirens, Detective Aidan Waits is on the hunt to find the identity of The Smiling Man. Disconnected from his history and careless of his future, Detective Aidan Waits has resigned himself to the night shift: an endless cycle of meaningless emergency calls and lonely dead ends. Until he and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter ‘Sutty’ Sutcliffe, are summoned to the Palace, a vast disused hotel in the centre of a restless, simmering city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. And he is smiling. The tags have been removed from the man’s clothes. His teeth have been filed down and replaced. Even his fingertips are not his own. Only a patch sewn into the inside of his trousers gives any indication as to who he was, and to the desperate last act of his life… But even as Waits pieces together this stranger’s identity, someone is sifting through the shards of his own. When mysterious fires, anonymous phone calls and outright threats start to escalate, he realises that a ghost from his own past haunts his every move. And to discover who the smiling man really is, he must first confront himself.

About the Author :
Joseph Knox was born and raised in and around Stoke and Manchester, where he worked in bars and bookshops before moving to London. He runs, writes and reads compulsively. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller. The Smiling Man is the second in the DC Aidan Waits series.

Review :
If you liked Sirens, you will love The Smiling Man. Gritty, noir, and packing a punch from the very first page. Gritty as hell. I loved it! A great urban cop thriller Sirens was one of the best books published last year and this intense, blackly comic follow-up is just as good. Joseph Knox has conjured up a sense of evil and corruption you can almost smell it. Razor-sharp urban noir – very special indeed. Sirens is a powerhouse of noir. Joseph Knox owns Manchester and paints it in all its grimy colours. Imperfect as Aidan Waits is, the Manchester DC is the shining light in a world peopled by the worst kinds of bad people. This is Knox's second Waits book in what holds the promise of a classic series. Talents such as Knox rarely emerge more than once in a generation. A crime fiction masterpiece If you like your crime fiction dark, gritty an contemporary, then Joseph Knox’s latest novel is for you . . . dripping with dark humour, written with style, a dark and engrossing ride through the mean streets of Manchester Promises to be a classic series Although nominally a police procedural, The Smiling Man has the sense of place and vivid atmosphere of a classic PI novel. .. Stylish, intelligent and full of heart, Joseph Knox is the best thing to have happened to English crime fiction in years.