The Second Cut – The Times crime book of the year

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Rilke has been doing his best to keep his life on an even keel. Running Bowery Auctions pays the bills, just about, and staying respectable feels safer than his old habits. When a friend tips him off about a promising house clearance, it seems like the break he has been waiting for. The following day, that friend is dead.

In The Second Cut, Jojo’s death is brushed aside with uncomfortable ease. His taste for casual hook-ups and drugs makes him an easy dismissal, and the police show little interest in looking deeper. Rilke is left with questions no one else seems willing to ask, and a growing sense that something is being deliberately ignored.

Drawn into an investigation he never intended to start, Rilke begins to pick through Jojo’s final days, uncovering secrets that refuse to stay buried. Each discovery pulls him further from the careful life he has built. Sharp, unsettling, and morally alert, The Second Cut asks who gets justice, who is forgotten, and what happens when respectability becomes a convenient excuse for silence.