A Guardian best crime and thriller book of 2024
‘Excellently lean and tense crime novel with a touch of the nouveau roman about it’ Ian Rankin
‘Mason has been mainlining Simenon for a while, and it shows’ Mick Herron
‘The very definition of unputdownable’ David Peace
‘It’s like the provincial British version of Maigret’ Clare Chambers
The people I work with call me ‘Finder’. I’m a specialist, a finder of missing people.
July 2015, Sevenoaks. 12-year-old schoolgirl Alice Johnson went missing while doing her paper round, her bag found discarded on the pavement. At 08.00, she was spotted standing in heavy rain at the side of the busy by-pass. At 11.00, she was seen talking to the driver of a black car in Tonbridge. After that, nothing. Alice was never found.
Nine years later the body of another schoolgirl, Joleen Price, is pulled from a nearby lake and a local man named Vince Burns detained. Convinced that Burns is guilty in both cases, SIO Dave Armstrong calls in the Finder to investigate the earlier disappearance.
Interviewing those who thought they knew her, the Finder gradually reveals a hidden Alice, a girl of surprising contradictions. Seeking answers from her divorced parents – an over-protective mother, a negligent father – the Finder is forced to consider violently opposing narratives. Was the timid 12-year-old a victim of the predator Burns, as he himself hints? Or was she carrying out a plan of her own?
The Case of the Lonely Accountant, book two in the Finder Mysteries, is OUT NOW!
‘Excellently lean and tense crime novel with a touch of the nouveau roman about it’ Ian Rankin
‘Mason has been mainlining Simenon for a while, and it shows’ Mick Herron
‘The very definition of unputdownable’ David Peace
‘It’s like the provincial British version of Maigret’ Clare Chambers
The people I work with call me ‘Finder’. I’m a specialist, a finder of missing people.
July 2015, Sevenoaks. 12-year-old schoolgirl Alice Johnson went missing while doing her paper round, her bag found discarded on the pavement. At 08.00, she was spotted standing in heavy rain at the side of the busy by-pass. At 11.00, she was seen talking to the driver of a black car in Tonbridge. After that, nothing. Alice was never found.
Nine years later the body of another schoolgirl, Joleen Price, is pulled from a nearby lake and a local man named Vince Burns detained. Convinced that Burns is guilty in both cases, SIO Dave Armstrong calls in the Finder to investigate the earlier disappearance.
Interviewing those who thought they knew her, the Finder gradually reveals a hidden Alice, a girl of surprising contradictions. Seeking answers from her divorced parents – an over-protective mother, a negligent father – the Finder is forced to consider violently opposing narratives. Was the timid 12-year-old a victim of the predator Burns, as he himself hints? Or was she carrying out a plan of her own?
The Case of the Lonely Accountant, book two in the Finder Mysteries, is OUT NOW!
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Reviews
Simon Mason is one of the brightest new names on the crime scene in years. Utterly compelling, Missing Person: Alice and The Case of the Lonely Accountant are brilliantly constructed mysteries, it is the cool tone in which they're written that's particularly striking, with the narrator carefully navigating his own tragedies while sifting through the traces of cracked lives with a careful humanity. Mason has been mainlining Simenon for a while, and it shows.
I have loved, as I have written here several times, Simon Mason's DI Wilkins series. And now I love, for different reasons, his Finder Mysteries. The tone of the novellas Missing Person: Alice and The Case of the Lonely Accountant (you'll want to read them both) is deadpan, somewhere between Georges Simenon and Kazuo Ishiguro (When We Were Orphans). Deadpan does not mean dry. Nor do the parallels between each case and the book that the narrator is reading - What Maisie Knew, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - indicate literary self-indulgence. These are satisfying, carefully plotted stories, as well as haunting depictions of voids in people's lives' Nicholas Clee, Bookbrunch
Short, sharp mysteries . . . [Talib] and his investigations are fascinating.
Extraordinary stories of ordinary lives riven by loss. I lived and breathed these two books for the time it took me to finish them. Absolutely exceptional.
Plotting and characterisation are as deft as we have come to expect from the talented Mason, with an elegant use of language.
[Simon] instinctively knows how to use and manipulate tropes pleasingly... there is much to enjoy
With tantalising hints at the sleuthing protagonist's equally murky back story these novellas break the walls of the police procedural down and descend into dark corners. I couldn't put them down.
Excellently lean and tense crime novel with a touch of the nouveau roman about it.
Amply fulfils Ian Rankin's recent admonition against long works. Psychologically, a rich exploration that is full of merited excitement.
I loved Simon Mason's Finder mysteries, I read them at great speed as I couldn't put them down, and was left hoping the next would come soon. They are such a good mixture of social observation, literary echoes, and offbeat urban landscapes. Such a clever device to have our Finder reading a classic novel as he investigates - structurally brilliant!
Oxford-based Simon Mason has made a mark with his civilised crime fiction, but this duo of elegantly written outings is his finest work yet. It comprises two novellas: The Case of the Lonely Accountant and Missing Person: Alice, both featuring a nameless sleuth, 'The Finder'. Plotting and characterisation equally felicitous.
A hard-hitting novel with a very human heart . . . Hints of Georges Simenon here though the story is set in contemporary England. It's lean, tense, gripping.
