The Dangerous Stranger

PREORDER THE LATEST DI RYAN WILKINS MYSTERY NOW 'This is absolutely first class' Stephen Fry 'Simon Mason has created crime fiction's most entertaining double act in decades' Mick Herron 'Move over Morse' Val McDermid 'My favourite UK series' M W Craven On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration. READERS ARE LOVING RYAN AND RAY: 'Loved it, what a wonderful read' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Really, really enjoyed and was sorry to finish it' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Have really enjoyed the whole series' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'If you like Slow Horses, either the books or the Apple series, this book is for you' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Set in present day Oxford, England, it is Morse times two' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Can't put these books down' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'A real un-putdownable page turner . . . A tremendous read' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.