Missing Person: Alice (The Finder Mysteries) - Finder Series (Paperback)

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

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. - Sarah Hilary

Plotting and characterisation are as deft as we have come to expect from the talented Mason, with an elegant use of language. - Financial Times