The Sleepwalker by Joseph Knox

Joseph Knox’s debut Sirens was one of the most hyped debut crime thrillers of 2017. Introducing his readers to his flawed and deeply corrupt detective Aidan Waits, it was gritty Manchester based tale of corruption and organised crime. Waits returned for a sequel in The Smiling Man, and now he returns once more in The Sleepwalker. In the previous Waits has been consigned to a nightshift patrol, his partner Peter “Sutty” Sutcliffe, an obnoxious and offensive older officer with a compulsion to rub his hands with alcohol gel. In this novel the two are guarding Martin Wick, a notorious child murderer, who lies in hospital at death’s door with cancer. But when someone kills the man by petrol bomb, Sutty is immolated also and has to be put into a drug induced coma. 

With his long-time partner in intensive care, Waits is partnered with Naomi Black, a young and up and coming detective, and told to find out what’s going on. After the events of books 1 and 2, Wait’s is a byword within the force as an officer under a cloud of suspicion. He is ordered to investigate Wick’s killing by Superintendent Parrs, a deeply cynical and manipulative senior officer who uses Waits for off-the-books tasks. So it is that Waits and Black operate a shadow investigation, separate from the official murder inquiry.

Writers of crime thrillers that feature police characters often strive for realism in police procedure. Some such novels are good, but others suffer in my opinion for these efforts. The crime novels I’ve always enjoyed the most are those that manage to get around this and Knox has always done just that. In Sirens he had his character undercover; in The Sleepwalker he exploited Waits and Sutty’s exile to the night shift, Parrs’ use of them to pursue cases that others ignored; in The Sleepwalker he has Waits and Black explicitly tasked with running a shadow investigation. It is to the author’s credit that he crafts his plots with plausibility, and this makes for a fast moving and believable story, a pared down and gritty tale of noir.

The Sleepwalker is likely to be Wait’s third and final outing (I can’t say why for fear of spoilers) and is a brilliant novel, a fantastic end to a gripping and truly impressive trilogy.  Joseph Knox is a novelist of real talent and I can’t wait to read what he writes next.

5 out of 5 stars