On a balmy June night, Kirsten, a young university student, is strolling home through a silent moonlit park when she is viciously attacked.

When she awakes in the hospital, she has no recollection of that brutal night. But then slowly, painfully, details reveal themselves -- dreams of two figures, one white and one black, hovering over her; snatches of a strange and haunting song; the unfamiliar texture of a rough and deadly hand ...

In another part of the country, Martha Browne arrives in a Yorkshire seaside town, posing as an author doing research for a book. But her research is of a particularly macabre variety. Who is she hunting with such deadly determination? And why?

The First Cut is a vivid and compelling psychological thriller, from the author of the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks series.

Amazon.com Review
Martha Browne is a woman with a mission--to exact her revenge on the man known as the Student Slasher, who brutalized her and left her for dead. With a suitcase full of disguises and a partial memory of her attacker, she sets out on an odyssey that takes the reader into her mind and weaves past and present in a tense, intricate narrative that builds in suspense until its shockingly violent denouement. This reissue of one of Robinson's early novels, The Final Cut, which was never published in the U.S., shows the promise of an author (Close to Home) whose command of his craft was fully realized in his subsequent books; until his next new title is published, this haunting psychological thriller should keep his dedicated fans busy. --Jane Adams