Joseph Knox - 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. Sirens is his first novel.
Author photo © Jay Brooks
Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Justifiably already highly-praised, this debut by a young Manchester author deserves all the generous encomiums and more lavished on it. A disgraced undercover young detective is tasked to find the errant daughter of an influential but shady politician and is plunged into a fascinating descent into the demi-world of the modern Mancunian drug scene. All too soon, the case becomes intensely personal as he gets embroiled with the 'sirens' of the title, the not always innocent young women who work on the fringes of the scene as courriers or more. With terrible affection for his bruised and imperfect characters, Knox displays a master's touch in slow plot building that any veteran crime writer would envy all the way through to a bleak but satisfying ending full of humanity and dread. British Noir at its sensitive and worrying best. ~ Maxim Jakubowski A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Justifiably already highly-praised, this debut by a young Manchester author deserves all the generous encomiums and more lavished on it. A disgraced undercover young detective is tasked to find the errant daughter of an influential but shady politician and is plunged into a fascinating descent into the demi-world of the modern Mancunian drug scene. All too soon, the case becomes intensely personal as he gets embroiled with the 'sirens' of the title, the not always innocent young women who work on the fringes of the scene as courriers or more. With terrible affection for his bruised and imperfect characters, Knox displays a master's touch in slow plot building that any veteran crime writer would envy all the way through to a bleak but satisfying ending full of humanity and dread. British Noir at its sensitive and worrying best. ~ Maxim Jakubowski A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
'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 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 puts together the pieces of this stranger's life, someone is sifting through the shards of his own. When the mysterious fires, anonymous phone calls and outright threats escalate, he realises that a ghost from his own past haunts his every move. And to discover the smiling man's identity, he must finally confront his own.
`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.
Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Justifiably already highly-praised, this debut by a young Manchester author deserves all the generous encomiums and more lavished on it. A disgraced undercover young detective is tasked to find the errant daughter of an influential but shady politician and is plunged into a fascinating descent into the demi-world of the modern Mancunian drug scene. All too soon, the case becomes intensely personal as he gets embroiled with the 'sirens' of the title, the not always innocent young women who work on the fringes of the scene as courriers or more. With terrible affection for his bruised and imperfect characters, Knox displays a master's touch in slow plot building that any veteran crime writer would envy all the way through to a bleak but satisfying ending full of humanity and dread. British Noir at its sensitive and worrying best. ~ Maxim Jakubowski A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Justifiably already highly-praised, this debut by a young Manchester author deserves all the generous encomiums and more lavished on it. A disgraced undercover young detective is tasked to find the errant daughter of an influential but shady politician and is plunged into a fascinating descent into the demi-world of the modern Mancunian drug scene. All too soon, the case becomes intensely personal as he gets embroiled with the 'sirens' of the title, the not always innocent young women who work on the fringes of the scene as courriers or more. With terrible affection for his bruised and imperfect characters, Knox displays a master's touch in slow plot building that any veteran crime writer would envy all the way through to a bleak but satisfying ending full of humanity and dread. British Noir at its sensitive and worrying best. ~ Maxim Jakubowski A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
It starts with the girl. How it ends is up to DC Aidan Waits. Isabelle Rossiter has run away again. When Aidan Waits, a troubled junior detective, is summoned to her father's penthouse home - he finds a manipulative man, with powerful friends. But retracing Isabelle's steps through a dark, nocturnal world, Waits finds something else. An intelligent seventeen-year-old girl who's scared to death of something. As he investigates her story, and the unsolved disappearance of a young woman just like her, he realizes Isabelle was right to run away. Soon Waits is cut loose by his superiors, stalked by an unseen killer and dangerously attracted to the wrong woman. He's out of his depth and out of time. How can he save the girl, when he can't even save himself?
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