Whisky From Small Glasses – The First D.C.I. Daley Thriller

Our summary description

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

When DCI Jim Daley is dispatched from the city to a small West Coast town, the setting feels almost wilfully misleading. The beach where a woman’s body has washed ashore is calm, the light soft, the community tight-lipped. Daley arrives without his usual support, conscious of every glance and every omission. Here, people have long memories and little appetite for outsiders asking questions.

As he works his way through the town’s careful civility, Daley uncovers old loyalties, private griefs, and the quiet resentments that bind neighbours together as much as they divide them. The case refuses to stay simple. Each answer opens another fault line, and danger creeps closer with unsettling ease.

Whisky From Small Glasses balances tension with a dry, observant wit, capturing the uneasy rhythm of a place where everyone knows each other and nothing is ever said outright. Against a vividly realised Scottish setting, the novel explores how love and betrayal can flourish side by side, and how violence often arrives disguised as familiarity.