The Cutting Room -- Louise Welsh

This book is pretty short (less than three hundred pages), but it took me longer to finish than it should have.  The fault is all mine.  I've probably mentioned this before, but I'm a bit more squeamish than I should be about sex scenes.  I think that maybe I'm just not used to them because I read so much YA fiction.  Or it might be because I have such a vivid imagination that a little goes a lot way.  Sometimes I feel like I'm intruding.  Or maybe I'm just totally immature. 

Graphic sex scenes seem to affect me the same way that they did when I was twelve--I read The Godfather at that age and it took me at least six tries to finish the Sonny-and-the-bridesmaid-at-Sonny's-wedding scene.  But honestly, how many times do you really need to use the word 'cock' in one novel?

I know that any of you that are out there that read (or have already read) The Cutting Room will now know that I'm a huge wimp, but what can I do?  I am a huge wimp.

My issues aside, I liked the book quite a lot.  The mystery itself was great:

The somewhat promiscuous Rilke works as an auctioneer for a small auction house in Glasgow.  He gets a call from a woman who wants to quickly liquidate her recently dead brother's estate.  Even though Rilke's firm is small, she gives them the job with the promise of a large bonus if they finish within her time frame.  She also asks Rilke to personally clean out a room in the attic--and to use discretion when dealing with the contents.  While packing up the attic, Rilke discovers an extensive library of pornography, as well as an envelope of decades-old photographs.  They appear to be snuff photos.  (Same as a snuff film, but photos).  Rilke finds himself unable to let them go--so he starts looking into the past of the man who owned them.

As you may be able to tell from the description, it's a pretty gritty book.  I didn't have things figured out by the end, even though there was a decent amount of foreshadowing.  Well, really the foreshadowing didn't point to anything specific--just that events would turn out differently than expected, so I didn't feel too dumb.  The characters were real; they had their own motivations.  Rose, Rilke's boss at the auction house, was especially wonderful, as was Anne Marie, an art student that made extra money posing nude for men with Polaroids. 

In some (many) mystery novels, all of the characters' motivations end up being tied up into the mystery itself.  In this one, the mystery was secondary (if that) to everyone but Rilke.  For the most part, everyone else was concerned with their own life first.  It felt a whole lot more realistic to me than the usual run-of-the-mill mystery novel.