Lost and Never Found: the twisty third book in the DI Wilkins Mysteries
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By Simon Mason
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1 review
‘Ryan and Ray go from strength to strength, and this, their third outing, is the best yet. Simon Mason has created crime fiction’s most entertaining double act in decades’ Mick Herron
Oxford, city of rich and poor, where the homeless camp out in the shadows of the gorgeous buildings and monuments. A city of lost things – and buried crimes.
At three o’clock in the morning, Emergency Services receives a call. ‘This is Zara Fanshawe. Always lost and never found.’ An hour later, the wayward celebrity’s Rolls Royce Phantom is found abandoned in dingy Becket Street. The paparazzi go wild.
For some reason, news of Zara’s disappearance prompts homeless woman Lena Wójcik to search the camps, nervously, for the bad-tempered vagrant known as ‘Waitrose’, a familiar sight in Oxford pushing his trolley of possessions. But he’s nowhere to be found either.
Who will lead the investigation and cope with the media frenzy? Suave, prize-winning, Oxford-educated DI Ray Wilkins is passed over in favour of his partner, gobby, trailer-park educated DI Ryan Wilkins (no relation). You wouldn’t think Ray would be happy. He isn’t. You wouldn’t think Ryan would be any good at national press presentations. He isn’t.
And when legendary cop Chester Lynch takes a shine to Ray – and takes against Ryan – things are only going to get even messier.
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Mick Herron’s quote on the cover says it all. “Crime fiction’s most entertaining double act in decades” is a good description of Mason’s DI Wilkins series, of which this is Book 3.
To enjoy these novels you need to suspend your belief, because in the real world there wouldn’t be a DI Ryan Wilkins, however diverse the police force might like to be. But he and his colleague, DI Ray Wilkins, are great characters who lift these books into something special. Oundle Crime read Book 1 (A Killing in November) and Book 2 (The Broken Afternoon) last year and loved them.
In this, Ryan is back on the force but working under the close scrutiny of senior officers – tolerated but not trusted. In the early hours of one morning, he’s called to the scene of a crashed and abandoned Rolls Royce Phantom in an unprepossessing Oxford side-street. The car belongs to Zara Fanshawe, a ‘celebrity’ known for her wild living and regular stints in rehab, who is nowhere to be found.
You’d expect Ryan’s colleague, DI Ray Wilkins to be put in charge of the case. He is, after all, Oxford-educated, suave, photogenic and well able to deal with the press attention that follows. But for reasons of his own, Detective Superintendent Wallace puts Ryan in charge which causes additional issues for the pair.
The only potential witnesses to the crash would be the homeless people who spend their nights in the vicinity but they’ve scattered to the winds, so Ryan and Ray have little to work with as they search for the missing woman. Soon they’re digging deep in the underbelly of Oxford life, among the poor and homeless, in order to get at the truth.
My verdict
I thought this was another really enjoyable instalment in the Ryan and Ray Wilkins story and it was completely appropriate that the cover quote should be from Mick Herron, because these books approach police procedurals in the same way that Herron’s deal with espionage. Good stories, told slightly tongue-in-cheek, with great characters. I don’t think you could fail to be entertained by them.
Don’t let my use of the word ‘entertained’ fool you. These aren’t Cosy Crime and the plots and characters aren’t clichéd. But although there’s nothing noir about them the stories are still meaty and interesting, yet very easy to enjoy. Simon Mason has a light touch, his plots bowl along at a good pace and you get absorbed very quickly. And yes, however silly some of the characters in this might have seemed, I ended up caring about them.
You could, of course, read this as a standalone novel, but if you like the sound of the DI Wilkins series I’d suggest you start from the beginning. Books 1 and 2 tell you much more about Ryan and Ray than this one does, and their backstories are interesting as well as fun.
To my mind a good book is one where I can lose myself in the story, and this series ticks those boxes for me and I wasn’t surprised to read that several TV companies are vying for the right to put them on our screens. I hope Lost and Never Found hits the same heights in the bestseller lists as the last two books because I really enjoyed this.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo
