Cross Cut

The dead don't haunt Warlow. The living do.

On a freezing February morning in Fishguard, refuse collector Kerry Mitchell discovers the body of seventeen-year-old Nicholas Vernon hidden among black bin bags near Tower Hill. The boy has been stabbed once and left to die in the cold. For DI Evan Warlow, already facing imminent heart surgery, the case arrives at a moment when time feels both urgent and uncertain.

Nicholas is revealed as an intelligent but isolated teenager, deeply interested in horror films and media studies, and quietly burdened with caring for his fragile parents. CCTV places him walking alone late at night toward the abandoned Captain's House overlooking the town-a decaying landmark tangled in myth and increasingly used by urban explorers and online thrill-seekers. Evidence recovered there points to a violent encounter, but motive remains unclear.

Suspicion soon falls on Mark Reid, a homeless man with severe mental health problems who shelters intermittently in the building. Under mounting media pressure, senior officers push for swift reassurance. Reid is arrested after a chaotic confrontation but proves unstable and incapable of coherent interview, later self-harming in custody. As forensic leads collapse and alternative suspects are eliminated, Warlow grows increasingly uneasy at how readily a vulnerable man has been turned into a public villain.

Forced back to first principles, the team re-examine the smallest details and uncover a different truth. Nicholas's death was not premeditated, but the result of a prank gone wrong, linked to a viral "Spookery" challenge encouraging teenagers to frighten each other in abandoned places. Startled and panicked, two local boys encountered Nicholas in the dark. One lashed out with a knife. Fear, silence, and a disastrous cover-up followed.

As the truth emerges, families are shattered and responsibility laid bare-not just for the killing, but for the choices that allowed it to happen. Collapsing under the strain, Warlow is finally forced to step away and confront his own mortality.

Cross Cut is a measured, unsettling exploration of unintended harm, moral panic, and the cost of misplaced certainty, asking how easily fear becomes violence-and how difficult justice can be when the truth cuts across everything we want to believe.

Tense, gritty, and impossible to put down, CROSS CUT marks the nineteenth outing from bestselling crime author Rhys Dylan. A must-read for fans of JD Kirk, Simon McCleave, and Peter Robinson.