review by Maryom
Detective Constable Aidan Waits has been relegated to the night shift. This means long hours of boredom sat in the car with his hated immediate superior, DI Sutcliffe, hours interrupted only by the occasional petty crime, such as an arsonist setting fire to litterbins, but nothing to really get his teeth into - and if there were the day shift would take it over. Then Waits and Sutcliffe receive a call from an empty hotel - a security guard has been knocked unconscious, and, investigating the premises further, Waits finds a dead body, smiling as if it had no troubles in the world. The man seems completely wiped clean of anything that might identify him - no wallet, no labels on its clothes, even his fingerprints have been removed, and his teeth replaced. It looks like Waits has found himself a proper case at last, and he's determined to hang on to it.
DC Aidan Waits, hero (or antihero) of Joseph Knox's first novel Sirens is back. He hates the guy he's partnered with, he hates the higher up brass at the station, he hates been demoted to the monotony of the night shift, but he's still determined to make a go of it as a detective. The discovery of a dead body leads Waits on a seemingly hopeless chase for a murderer through the grimier side of Manchester. Meanwhile, he's got himself involved, against his superiors' wishes, in a case of blackmail of a young female student , and is himself being followed by someone sinister from his past.
Waits is definitely one of the modern breed of troubled detectives, and as some of his backstory was gradually revealed I began to wonder if through his career he sought to gain a certain level of absolution for his past.
Whereas, though, I loved Sirens, I was less comfortable with The Smiling Man; this isn't in any way Knox's fault - in fact in might be because his depictions of child cruelty, and the less salubrious side of Manchester were just too real and disturbing.
Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Doubleday
Genre - adult crime
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