Missing Person: Alice (The Finder Mysteries)

'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?

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. -- Mick Herron
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. The Times

SIMON MASON has pursued parallel careers as a publisher and an author, whose YA crime novels Running Girl, Kid Got Shot and Hey, Sherlock! feature the sixteen-year-old slacker genius Garvie Smith. A former Managing

Director of David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, he has also taught at Oxford Brookes University and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford.

His critically acclaimed DI Ryan Wilkins Mysteries, which started with A Killing in November have received numerous accolades, including being shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, selected as Times Audio Book of the Week and Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month.

Missing Person: Alice is a Finder Mystery.

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