Woman Who Laughed

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A01=Simon Mason
Author_Simon Mason
books set in Sheffield
British crime fiction
Category=FBA
Category=FF
eq_bestseller
eq_crime
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
Finder series
gripping
literary crime fiction
missing girl thriller
mystery thrillers
page-turner
private detective

Product details

  • ISBN 9781529439700
  • Weight: 160g
  • Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
  • Publication Date: 04 Jun 2026
  • Publisher: Quercus Publishing
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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'The very definition of unputdownable' David Peace
'Mason packs more into 200 pages than many writers do at twice the length' Sunday Times

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.

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. Lost and Never Found is the third book in the DI Ryan Wilkins Mysteries. The first book, A Killing in November, received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. The Second book, The Broken Afternoon, was a Times Audio Book of the Week and a Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month.

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