The Smiling Man - Joseph Knox

I read Sirens earlier this year. For my thoughts and the provenance of my acquisition of Joseph Knox's books check out this post -

https://bookphace.blogspot.com/2020/02/sirens-joseph-knox.html

Blurb -

A body has been found on the fourth floor of Manchester’s vast and empty Palace Hotel. The man is dead. And he is smiling. 

The tags have been removed from his clothes. His teeth have been replaced. Even his fingertips are not his own. Only a patch sewn into his trousers offers any information about him. 

Detective Aidan Waits and his unwilling partner, DI Sutcliffe, must piece together the scant clues to identify the stranger. But as they do, Aidan realises that a ghost from his past haunts the investigation. He soon recognises that to discover who the smiling man really is, he must first confront the scattered debris of his own life . . . 

If I liked Sirens then I loved The Smiling Man. A reacquaintance with Aidan Waits, the delightfully flawed detective who hinted in the former book of a past significant to his present and maybe his future. We are treated to the exposition of that past. It's cleverly done for you don't realise it initially. I must be careful not to spoil but it does give you an insight into this man's motivation and how he ticks. 

This book is another intelligently plotted thriller, substantial and rich in its creation of places, peoples and atmospheres. It's another complex story that requires full attention from the reader if they are to gain maximum pleasure from the reading of it. It's dark and uncompromising, looking at the seedier side of life in a city challenged by all the inner city problems synonymous with our current age.

The narrative is evenly paced and never lets up. There's twist after twist as followed up leads drag us down blind alleys and the red herrings are smoked, pickled and salted. The writing is assured and confident.The realism is such that you fear and wonder what lengths this writer may have gone to create it so powerfully! There's no shortage of good crime thrillers but what sets Knox apart from some of his contemporaries is the gracefulness of his prose which sounds like a contradiction when you have a raw, and at times, violent tale. Maybe it's because one's expectations of a crime novel hover beneath the bench mark of literature. 

Reading this certainly took my mind off the current situation we're living in. And now I need to seek out a pandemic purveyor of books so I can purchase The Sleepwalker! 
My thanks to Joseph for a signed copy which I will treasure.