The first Craig Robertson book I had ever read and what a great idea writing through the eyes of the protagonist, so clever

Unexpected ending, not sure I agree with the ending. Good book but very different as written from the point of view of the murderer.

This sounds like a great crime thriller - a serial killer who is seemingly picking his victims entirely at random. But half the enjoyment of a book of this type is working out who the killer is - and this is immediately taken away as the entire book is written from the point of view of the killer (a weirdly omniscient killer, who seems at times to know what's going on in places where he couldn't possibly be present...) It's not like this hasn't been done before, and usually I would like the slightly different angle, but it's really hard to like a character who is randomly selecting innocent people to butcher, and the killer isn't charismatic enough to be an effective anti-hero either. So the reader is just left trying to work out why the killer has set out on a murdering spree - but even this is revealed relatively early on in the story! There are a few surprises in the plot, but mostly it's a bit disappointing, I hated all the Glasgow gangland stuff and I thought the ending was a massive anticlimax!

I wanted to like this book far more than I did. Crime thrillers set in Glasgow are just my cup of tea and this was told mainly from the point of view of the killer, with the only additional information coming from newspaper clippings. It was a book that just screamed ‘me’. Unfortunately, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected. The Cutter himself was quite an interesting character on paper, seemingly picking his victims at random. His methods of finding victims and killing them all differ. He even contemplates the thought of killing children, if his randomised methods happen to work out that way. However, I found him mostly unlikeable and unsympathetic, even after finding out his motives for killing. The only time I even remotely felt for him was when he was with his wife. Both of them were dealing, poorly, with personal tragedy. It was the only time he came across as human to me. Bad things happen to good people but most of them don’t turn into serial killers so why did The Cutter? This was never really addressed sufficiently enough for me. The characterisation of Glasgow was a complete cliché and didn’t impress me at all. Gangsters, neds, drug dealers, addicts. All of them exist in Glasgow, as they do everywhere, but it’s not what the city is all about. I do think that anyone familiar with Glasgow will get a lot more out of the story than those not. It mentions a lot of different places with little context as to where they are and I feel only a native or frequent visitor (I went to university in the city) would be able to place. Another negative point for me was the mistakes in the book. From confusing the number of the person he was going to kill (one of his ways was to walk past people and count to a certain number, and that person would be his next victim) to misnaming a real-life murder victim that would take seconds to look up. The second was a big story in Scotland and the error jolted me right out of reading. The novel, overall, wasn’t bad. I enjoyed it enough to keep reading until the end but I was never really impatient to know what happened next.