Broken Afternoon

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.

Oxford-based author Simon Mason has made a mark with his almost identically named sleuths Ray Wilkins and Ryan Wilkins, the former precise and formal, the latter dishevelled (and now discharged from his job). In The Broken Afternoon, a child goes missing from an Oxford nursery, and the duo must work together again to tackle a clandestine criminal network. Such issues as the vulnerability of children and current diversity drives are grist to Mason's mill in this beguiling offspring of Colin Dexter's Morse series.