The Smiling Man

December 1, 2018
Stuck on the graveyard shift after using and stealing drugs--from the evidence room--Detective Constable Aidan Waits is squeezed from all sides after finding a murdered man in an abandoned Manchester hotel.The hotel, an enormous, mazelike Victorian creation called the Palace whose clock tower tells the wrong time, is in the process of being sold by the bitterly separated couple that owns it. In the interim, a security guard has been running prostitutes in one of its rooms. Rendered unidentifiable through the removal of his fingerprints and the filing of his teeth, the murder victim is tagged Smiley Face after his rictus grin. Drawing the displeasure of top brass for investigating a hateful right-wing TV commentator for sexually harassing a teenage girl and blackmail, Waits finds himself pushing against the city's power structure. Now off drugs and booze, he is vulnerable to memories of a disturbing childhood from which he has long tried to hide. In this, the second installment in a series that began with the drug-hazed, sometimes-hallucinogenic Sirens (2018), Knox operates in a more classic noir manner. Waits exchanges nasty barbs with the burned-out superior officer with whom he has partnered (he "looked like he'd survived an embalming"). But the deeper into the murder the book gets, the more knotty and nightmarish it becomes. No one makes nightclubs more zombielike than Knox. Manchester, as menacing as it is dark and subjected to stifling summer heat, will have its own say in how and when the past comes crashing down on Waits.With his second novel in what looks to be an enduring series, Knox takes his place alongside such writers as Val McDermid, David Peace, and Sophie Hannah in making Manchester a destination for crime fiction.

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December 15, 2018
Detective Aidan Waits' meth habit, propensity for violence, and general disregard for authority have eclipsed his recent implosion of a Manchester drug organization (in Sirens, 2018), and he's been exiled to the night shift, where he and his barely tolerable partner, Sully, can't muster much enthusiasm for investigating a series of trash-can fires. That changes when a routine alarm check at a shuttered luxury hotel leads to the discovery of a man's body. Aidan and Sully have found a solid mystery: the dead man has taken unusual steps to hide his identity by having his fingertips and teeth surgically altered. Aidan's focus on diving into the secrets of feuding hotel owners, Manchester prostitutes, and the intentionally disappeared is compromised, however, by the fact that his vicious stepfather has hunted him down, determined to settle old scores. The interspersed narrative of a terrified young boy forced to assist his stepfather's violent crimes offers insight into a past that could breed Aidan's brand of determined self-destructiveness. Another gripping, darkly poetic entry in a series worthy of comparison to Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)