The Smiling Man
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Sirens, damaged Detective Aidan Waits returns in a mind-bending new thriller that will have everyone asking “Who is the Smiling Man?”
Aidan Waits is back on the night shift, the Manchester PD dumping ground for those too screwed-up for more glamorous work. But the monotony of petty crimes and lonesome nights is shattered when he and his partner are called to investigate a break-in The Palace, an immense, empty hotel in the center of the city.
There they find the body of a man. He is dead. The tags have been cut from his clothes, his teeth have been filed down, and even his fingertips have been replaced…
And he is smiling.
But as Waits begins to unravel the mystery of the smiling man, he becomes a target. Someone wants very badly to make this case disappear, and as their threats escalate, Aidan realizes that the answers may lie not only with the wealthy families and organized criminals connected to the Palace, but with a far greater evil from his own past.
To discover the smiling man’s identity, he must finally confront his own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Knox's fine sequel to 2018's Sirens finds Det. Aidan Watts "an incompetent officer with a substance abuse problem and too much baggage to work cases," according to one police colleague on night duty in the city of Manchester. "I was on my 120th night shift in a row. Six months into what felt like a life sentence." With his acerbic, venomous partner, Det. Insp. Peter Sutcliffe, Watts responds to an intruder alarm at the disused Palace Hotel, where they discover a dead body, its facial muscles "locked into a wide, wincing grin." The complex narrative proceeds on several tracks, centering on the detectives' efforts to identity the smiling man and his killer. Vivid, visceral flashbacks reveal a series of other violent crimes. Knox's nightmarish prose compels, but readers will struggle to assemble the pieces of this intricate puzzle with its substantial cast. This ambitious book will appeal to those who like particularly grim story lines and deeply flawed protagonists.)
