Finder
3 total works
Bournemouth 2008, the height of the financial crash. Don Bayliss, a timid and well-mannered accountant, vanishes after leaving his office before a scheduled meeting. His wife is both perplexed and distraught. His clothes are found discarded at the mouth of Poole Harbour.
After seven years of searching with no firm leads, the investigation is closed, and Don is presumed dead.
Until, sorting through his possessions, his wife finds a garish business card of one Dwight Fricker and decides it must be of some importance. Now more than eight years after his disappearance Dorset Police call in the Finder and the cold case is reopened.
The Finder begins with the last sightings of Don on the day he went missing, hearing how he seemed in a hurry, somewhat distracted? He unearths a string of overlooked clues that lead him to face the unlikely friendships that Don had made, the somewhat overbearing nature of Mrs Bayliss, the secrets that haunted him in his home life and the mistakes that led to him being investigated at work.
The Case of the Lonely Accountant is a dark and rich mystery that centres upon one lonely man and reveals the distance between those who are missing and those who are lost.
A Guardian best crime and thriller book of 2024
'Excellently lean and tense crime novel with a touch of the nouveau roman about it' Ian Rankin
'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?
The Case of the Lonely Accountant, book two in the Finder Mysteries, is OUT NOW!
'The very definition of unputdownable' David Peace
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?
Is Ella really still alive? If so, why has she reappeared now? And does she realise the danger she is in?