________‘Gritty as hell. I loved it. A great urban cop thriller‘ Ian Rankin As heard on BBC Radio 5 Live Phil Williams ShowFrom the bestselling author of Sirens, Detective Aidan Waits is on the hunt to find the identity of The Smiling Man.________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 . . . ________‘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

How do you solve the murder of a man who doesn’t exist? Detective Aidan Waits returns in a brilliantly gritty crime novel.About the AuthorJoseph Knox has lived in Stoke on Trent, Manchester and London. In 2020, he became an Irish citizen. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller and has been translated into eighteen languages. The Smiling Man and The Sleepwalker are the second and third books in the Waits trilogy. His first standalone novel, True Crime Story, was a Times number one bestseller.ReviewsIf you liked Sirens, you will love The Smiling Man. Gritty, noir, and packing a punch from the very first page. * Jane Harper, author of The Dry *Gritty as hell. I loved it! A great urban cop thriller — Ian RankinSirens was one of the best books published last year and this intense, blackly comic follow-up is just as good. Joseph Knox has conjured up a sense of evil and corruption you can almost smell it. — Jake Kerridge * Sunday Express *Imperfect as Aidan Waits is, the Manchester DC is the shining light in a world peopled by the worst kinds of bad people. This is Knox’s second Waits book in what holds the promise of a classic series. * Sunday Times Crime Club *Talents such as Knox rarely emerge more than once in a generation. A crime fiction masterpiece * Metro *Book InformationISBN 9781784162191Author Joseph KnoxFormat PaperbackPage Count 464Imprint Black SwanPublisher Transworld Publishers LtdWeight(grams) 315gDimensions(mm) 198mm * 127mm * 29mm