The Woman Who Laughed

Finder Mysteries, Book 3

By: Simon Mason

Narrated by: Matthew Spencer

'The very definition of unputdownable' David Peace
'Mason packs more into 200 pages than many writers do at twice the length' Sunday Times

In the first months of 2020 there was a spate of murders of Black sex workers in northern cities. One of them was Ella Bailey, last seen talking to a punter in an alley in Sheffield city centre, and although no trace of her was ever found, the punter, Michael Godley, soon confessed to all three murders.

Five years later, as another sex worker is murdered in the same district, the bag Ella had been carrying with her reappears, hanging on the door handles of a café, and a local vagrant claims to have seen Ella sitting on a bench in a churchyard near the site of the murder. South Yorkshire Police call in the Finder.

So begins a search that takes him back to the strange days of the pandemic, to talk to those who knew Ella best, such as her wayward girlfriend 'Loz', abusive boyfriend Caine Poynton-Smith and respectable foster-parents still struggling to come to terms with Ella's life. How did their intelligent, strong-willed daughter - bright student and national schoolgirl athletics champion - end up in that alley?

As fear grips the city, our Finder must court danger to discover the truth.©2025 Simon Mason (P)2025 Quercus Editions Limited

Critic reviews

The Finder Mysteries are everything great crime fiction aspires to be: human, intricate and hugely entertaining. The Woman Who Laughed kept me guessing, to the last page, and kept me thinking long after that. Simon Mason is a master storyteller whose books should be on every serious reader's wishlist. (Sarah Hilary)

[T]ranslates the ethos of Georges Simenon's Maigret into an English setting: concise, richly characterised, impeccably plotted (Barry Forshaw (The Best of Summer Crime, Financial Times))

Not as engaging as the first two in the series

I liked the first two books in the Finder series. Found it interesting to be dropped into a community with the Finder to discover all of its secrets and uniqueness. I found this one a bit thin on that front and somewhat lackluster overall. These are pretty short books, so there isn't a lot of room for detail and world building, but this one still felt much lighter that the other two, just the same.