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  • Published: 28 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784162184
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

The Sleepwalker




Detective Aidan Waits has one job: to extract the location of Martin Wick’s final victim before he passes away. But Wick’s whispered final words tell of a contract killer at work…and Aidan's name is next on the list.

‘He said he didn’t remember killing them…’

As a series of rolling blackouts plunge the city into darkness, Detective Aidan Waits sits on an abandoned hospital ward, watching a mass murderer slowly die. Transferred from his usual night shift duties and onto protective custody, he has just one job…

To extract the location of Martin Wick’s final victim before the notorious mass murderer passes away.

Wick has spent over a decade in prison, in near-total silence, having confessed to an unspeakable crime that shocked the nation and earned him the nickname of The Sleepwalker.

But when a daring premeditated attack leaves one police officer dead and another one fighting for his life, Wick’s whispered last words will send Waits on a journey into the heart of darkness…

Manipulated by a reticent psychopath from his past, and under investigation from his new partner, Detective Constable Naomi Black, Waits realises too late that a remorseless contract killer is at work.

Can Aidan Waits solve his last case before fleeing justice?

Or will his name be next on the hit list?

  • Published: 28 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784162184
  • Imprint: Black Swan
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Joseph Knox

Joseph Knox was born and raised in and around Stoke and Manchester, where he worked in bars and bookshops before moving to London. He runs, writes and reads compulsively. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller and has been translated into eighteen languages.

The Sleepwalker is the third book in the Aidan Waits series.

Also by Joseph Knox

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Praise for The Sleepwalker

‘Knox’s pitch-black novels are among crime fiction’s most compelling’

i

‘Fierce, funny and flint-sharp. Joseph Knox is the true grit of Brit noir'

Cara Hunter

Dark, gritty and compelling, this will have you turning the pages until the early hours of the morning

The Independent

Oozing dread, full of surprises and with a powerful sense of outraged humanity, The Sleepwalker is Joseph Knox’s finest novel yet.

The Times

‘[An] ingenious plot … full of striking revelations’

CrimeTime

Unrepentantly, invigoratingly dark

Sunday Express

Unflinching, fearsomely realistic, superb...The Aidan Waits series has the makings of a classic of the genre.

The Daily Mail

Knox is proving to be amongst the most pithy of British crime writers, and his exuberant novels are among the best in the current field

Barry Forshaw, The Financial Times

mesmerizing depictions of Manchester by night; a plot that is baroque in its shimmering complexity and overall, an hallucinatory power that borders on the uncanny

Irish Times

Gritty, dark, funny, and very, very good

The Sun

bleak, brutal and brilliant

i news

brilliant ... displays all the virtues of a high-energy police procedural while being spiritually and tonally in thrall to classic PI fiction, with a cumulative hallucinatory power that borders on the uncanny.

Irish Times

Gritty, dark and absorbing

The Sunday Express, Thrillers of the Year