Skip content
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

The Smiling Man

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Lewys Taylor

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 11 hours 7 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Smiling Man by Joseph Knox, ready by Lewys Taylor.

‘I usually experienced the presence of a dead body as an absence, but in this case, it felt like a black hole opening up in front of me’

Disconnected from his history and careless of his future, Detective Aidan Waits has resigned himself to the night shift. An endless cycle of meaningless emergency calls and lonely dead ends. Until he and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter ‘Sutty’ Sutcliffe, are summoned to The Palace, a vast disused hotel in the centre of a restless, simmering city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. And he is smiling.

The tags have been removed from the man’s clothes. His teeth filed down and replaced. Even his fingertips are not his own. Only a patch sewn into the inside of his trousers gives any indication as to who he was, and to the desperate last act of his life…

But even as Waits puts together the pieces of this stranger’s life, someone is sifting through the shards of his own.

When the mysterious fires, anonymous phone calls and outright threats escalate, he realises that a ghost from his own past haunts his every move.

And to discover the smiling man’s identity, he must finally confront his own.

'An arresting new talent' Metro

Joseph Knox has lived in Stoke on Trent, Manchester and London. In 2020, he became an Irish citizen. His debut novel Sirens was a bestseller and has been translated into eighteen languages. The Smiling Man and The Sleepwalker are the second and third books in the Waits trilogy. His first standalone novel, True Crime Story, was a Times number one bestseller.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

If you liked Sirens, you will love The Smiling Man. Gritty, noir, and packing a punch from the very first page. Gritty as hell. I loved it! A great urban cop thriller Sirens was one of the best books published last year and this intense, blackly comic follow-up is just as good. Joseph Knox has conjured up a sense of evil and corruption you can almost smell it. Imperfect as Aidan Waits is, the Manchester DC is the shining light in a world peopled by the worst kinds of bad people. This is Knox's second Waits book in what holds the promise of a classic series. Talents such as Knox rarely emerge more than once in a generation. A crime fiction masterpiece Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting