Missing Person: Alice (The Finder Mysteries)

Oundle Crime was first introduced to the author Simon Mason when we read two of his books (A Killing in November and Broken Afternoon) about the Detective Inspectors Wilkins – Ryan and Ray. We loved them. Now Mason has started a new crime series for adults known as The Finder Mysteries, and Missing Person: Alice is the first of two books (so far), both of which were published last September.

The narrator of this story – Finder – is actually an ex-policeman called Talib. A few years before, during a cost-cutting exercise, he had accepted redundancy and gone freelance as a specialist finder of missing people. His clients are usually police authorities, trying to keep their payroll costs down by using third-party contractors. In this case the missing girl, Alice Johnson, was just twelve years old when she disappeared in July 2015. She’d been doing her early morning paper round and her bag, which was half full of undelivered papers, had been found lying on the pavement of a residential street in Sevenoaks. Despite a couple of sightings, no trace of Alice had ever been found but now, nine years later, the police have reopened the file because comments made by a local man under arrest on suspicion of the murder of another girl have made them believe he might also be responsible for Alice’s disappearance.

Finder arrives by train and books into a Bed & Breakfast, run by a woman called Mrs Wentworth and, having settled in, starts to re-trace Alice’s movements. He interviews the suspected murderer and he talks to Alice’s parents (who were divorced before Alice disappeared), the people who thought they’d seen her on the day she went missing, girls who had been at school with her, and many others. The picture of Alice that emerges is that of an enigma. She wasn’t just a quiet child, she sounds as if she had been almost invisible, with no real friends and no-one who can tell Finder what she was like. Even her parents struggle to describe her or paint a picture of her personality, likes or dislikes. Each of them is wrapped up in their own anger and has a firm conviction that the police messed up their original investigation. And the police are eager to charge their prisoner with another murder to make his conviction a sure-fire certainty. Finder has very few clues to work with and when he does discover what happened, it’s not what you think.

My verdict
I really enjoyed this and will definitely be looking for more in the series. If a crime mystery can be beautifully written, this fits the bill. In places it’s quite lyrical.

The reader moves around Sevenoaks with Finder, seeing what he sees and hearing from an assortment of characters. Slowly the minutiae of Alice’s life is revealed, quietly prised out of the people Finder talks to; usually when they haven’t ever realised they had any information to impart. It’s not long before you have a picture of Alice in your mind’s eye; and an idea of her relationships with the adults around her and her classmates at school. ‘Still waters run deep’ would be an apt description, but only once you’ve seen all the different pieces of the jigsaw. Towards the end I had a faint suspicion of what might have happened but I remained unsure until the truth was revealed.

What I found clever about this book is the way Simon Mason draws you through the story. It’s actually quite slow-moving, but so carefully constructed the reader can enjoy every turn of the plot. It left me trying to work out why this felt so different from so many crime mysteries and the only thing I could come up with was that it was relaxing to read. There’s no hyperbole in the novel. In places the prose is even sparse. But Mason paints a vivid picture of Finder’s investigation, the places he goes, the people he meets. It’s written so well the characters and places are in your head before you know it.

Missing person: Alice is an unassuming mystery and if you’re looking for a plot with lots of action and impetus, this won’t be for you. But if you enjoy a well-written, considered and cleverly plotted story do read it. The author Clare Chambers is quoted on the cover saying it’s a “…British version of Maigret” and that’s quite a good description.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo, Oundle Crime