Louise Welsh made Rilke’s fans wait 20 years between his first and second outing, so the appearance of a third (and potentially final) book starring everyone’s favourite cadaverous auctioneer, a mere three years on, is a bit of a treat. If the OG is still on your bookshelf, it’s well worth a re-read: Rilke’s turn of the century Glasgow is a bleak place, teeming with forgotten details such as paperback A–Zs, porn on VHS and a Finnieston haunted by hustlers and hucksters rather than hipsters and hedonists. Seeing Rilke fit into a changed world is part of the charm; whether he’s Just Eating bacon rolls, derision dripping like brown sauce, or musing about queer representation, Rilke is not as old-fashioned as his clothes, job and reliance on cash would suggest. Yet the story begins where it always does: at Bowery Auctions, with a murder on the doorstep. 

Rilke books are always part appraisal, part love letter to Glasgow; the city is as much part of the action as Rose, Les and the rest. This time though, Rilke’s ire feels wider; abusers are ‘as sly as privilege’ and while the utterly urban auctioneer isn’t very good at tree-spotting, he knows a tax-dodging conifer plantation when he sees one. But his friendships drive the action as much as the crime or procedural elements. Rilke’s eventual acceptance that no man is an island completes the trilogy’s emotional arc beautifully, while solving the murder keeps both jeopardy and pace high.

It’s a heady combination and all praise to Welsh, who clearly has no truck with the idea that fiction should fit into neat little boxes. Fans will gobble this up, though any newcomers would be well-advised to start at the beginning. Either way, anyone who loves a bit of genre-busting black-as-night crime fiction will be delighted to accompany Rilke and co through Glasgow’s soft underbelly. 

The Cut Up is published by Canongate on Thursday 29 January; main picture: Julie Broadfoot.