The Cutting Room

About this book

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

Rilke is an auctioneer accustomed to other people’s secrets. He handles estates and objects without asking how they came to be, or what they once meant. But when he uncovers a concealed cache of photographs, brutal, intimate, and deeply unsettling, detachment becomes impossible.

The images belonged to a recently deceased man whose life now demands investigation. Drawn by curiosity and something darker, Rilke begins to trace the collection’s origins, moving through a city that reveals itself only after dark. What he finds is an underworld shaped by money, power, and private obsessions, where desire curdles into violence and looking too closely carries its own risks.

The Cutting Room is a novel about voyeurism and moral corrosion, about the thin line between observer and participant. As Rilke descends further, the question is no longer who created the images, but what it costs to keep watching, and whether some knowledge leaves no safe way back.