ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – The Woman Who Laughed by Simon Mason
The Woman Who Laughed is book three in The Finder Mysteries by Simon Mason. It’s published by riverrun and is out now. My thanks to the publishers for the review copy.
In the first months of 2020 there was a spate of murders of Black sex workers in northern cities. One of them was Ella Bailey, last seen talking to a punter in an alley in Sheffield city centre, and although no trace of her was ever found, the punter, Michael Godley, soon confessed to all three murders.
Five years later, as another sex worker is murdered in the same district, the bag Ella had been carrying with her reappears, hanging on the door handles of a café, and a local vagrant claims to have seen Ella sitting on a bench in a churchyard near the site of the murder. South Yorkshire Police call in the Finder.
So begins a search that takes him back to the strange days of the pandemic, to talk to those who knew Ella best, such as her wayward girlfriend ‘Loz’, abusive boyfriend Caine Poynton-Smith and respectable foster-parents still struggling to come to terms with Ella’s life. How did their intelligent, strong-willed daughter – bright student and national schoolgirl athletics champion – end up in that alley?
As fear grips the city, our Finder must court danger to discover the truth.
The Woman Who Laughed follows the ‘Finder’, an Iraqi man named Talib, who works with the police to try and locate missing people. It’s the third in the series but I haven’t read the previous two (I want to now, though!) and it doesn’t matter as each case is a self-contained story.
The Finder is called to Sheffield to investigate why now, five years after her disappearance and presumed murder, the bag belonging to sex worker, Ella Bailey, has suddenly turned up, hanging on the doorway of a café. The journey to the truth takes the Finder on a twisting and turning search of the streets of Sheffield and Chesterfield.
Sense of place is incredibly strong in this book. Being from Sheffield, that really appealed to me and made it all the more interesting as I could imagine the neighbourhoods that the Finder was visiting. The book itself is not a long one at 224 pages but it kept me engrossed and threw quite a few red herrings into the mix.
I thought The Woman Who Laughed was a really great read. It’s suspenseful, dark and mysterious and the determination of the Finder to learn the truth comes through in his every word, as the whole story is told in his own narrative alongside his reading of a classic novel, in this case Jane Austen’s Persuasion. A highly enjoyable, pared back read with an enigmatic protagonist.
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 a Times Audio Book of the Week and a Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month.
The Woman Who Laughed is a Finder Mystery.