As Louise Welsh notes in her afterword to this work, 20 years prior she wrote The Cutting Room, the novel that launched her career and won multiple prizes. Her first novel was, she says, a partial response to homophobic attitudes. In 2022 the world has clearly moved on. The Second Cut is quite consciously a post-COVID novel. It contains a new perspective on LGBTQ+ identity, with the (broad) group now having more visibility, voice and confidence, even if not full respect — certainly in a city such as Glasgow. Welsh is quite explicitly a Glaswegian author, and the pulse of the city, its rhythms, its history (of former colonial oppressors), are captured vividly. The Glasgow depicted by Welsh overlaps with that of Douglas Stuart — both are gay authors too — yet remains different. The constant across all of Welsh's work is her ability to tell a compelling crime story; to keep the action sustained, with hints, partial reveals and still a few ambiguities at closure. Rilke (who also features in The Cutting Room) is an amoral narrator with his own sense of justice. It is hard not to like him. This is a gritty and sometimes violent read, which won't be to the taste of all, but I thoroughly enjoyed. Nine out of ten.
By Louise Welsh