‘The Dangerous Stranger’ by Simon Mason

Published by Riverrun,
12 March 2026.
ISBN: 987-1-52943959-5 (HB)

The place: Oxford. The protagonists: two detective inspectors. One is Oxford educated, sophisticated, socially aware, thoughtful; he's called Ray. The other is inarticulate, ungainly, intuitive and was brought (or dragged) up on a trailer park; he's called Ryan. All they have in common is their surname; they're both called Wilkins. And they're both fathers. And they get results. Quite how that happens may be a bigger mystery than any they have to solve, especially to the Chief Constable.

 The Dangerous Stranger is the fifth book in the series, and though they'll never be friends exactly, by now they've sort of settled into an uneasy partnership. So when a horrific incident occurs outside a hotel given over to asylum seekers, they're the ones who are sent to investigate. They discover that the victim wasn't an asylum seeker at all, but a visitor to Oxford who turns out to be French. The Chief Constable is appalled: a potential major diplomatic crisis on his own doorstep, and his two least favourite detectives looking into it.

It gets worse. The French visitor's upmarket London hotel is unco-operative. The French Embassy call in one of their own. And to cap it all, Ray Wilkins's wife takes their baby twins and leaves him, and his father announces that he has a terminal disease. And Ryan's violent dad is out of prison. 

Lurking in the background are a genuine asylum seeker on the run from some unknown danger, a man called Dogs and someone called the Head-Hunter who seems to scare the daylights out of half the criminal underworld. 

The question is, who will pull all these threads together and avoid the diplomatic crisis? One guess should do it. 

Simon Mason has created one of the most engaging sets of characters crime fiction has thrown up recently. Oxford mysteries aren't thin on the ground, but not like this. You'll be reading into the small hours, desperate to know  not only who committed the crime, but also whether the rookie DC on the team will ever make a decent detective, if Ray's wife will come back, and most important of all, if four-year-old Ryan, big Ryan's endearing son, will build the best castle for his school project.  

This is crime fiction at its most quirky – and it's unputdownable.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Simon Mason is an author of children's and adult books. His first adult novel, a black comedy entitled The Great English Nude, won the Betty Trask first novel award and Moon Pie was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction prize. Running Girl is his first story starring Garvie Smith. Simon lives in Oxford with his wife and their two children.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.