Craig Robertson’s debut, Random, turned the traditional mystery novel on its side, seducing his readers with a main character that walked a careful line between revenge and remorse. Snapshot is a fitting second novel, full of people for whom the job is more than just a day’s work, and the world around them, Glasgow in particular, filled with the sort of shadows that can blind those less determined to see.

Snapshot begins in the dim mist of a rainy Glaswegian evening with a sudden, if not unexpected, death. Lying dead on the floor is a minor player in the tumultuous drug scene, a man who courted death each day, with each deal. He is one of many, another stabbing victim in a city where they blend into the every day. But this time it is not the body that is the focus, but the photographer, Tony Winter.

Winter is a civilian, someone whose permission to cross the police tape is contingent on his talent with his camera, his ability to accurately record death and the debris that surround it. But for Winter, his job is more than that, it is a compulsion, a need to see the darkest things that happen on Glasgow’s streets, a chance to memorialize the last moments of those around him.

He wanted to be out there on the streets where the blood was, where the dirt lay thick and the dark shadows were long, where the people were. Real people, bad people, good people, scared people. He wanted to be where they lived and died, particularly where they died.

But Winter’s obsession comes with a singular ability to understand the details he captures, and when he realizes that those details draw connections that the forensic teams have missed, he finds himself searching deeper into a danger that usually stops on the other side of his lens. There is a sniper hunting Glasgow, but Winter sees more than just the singular crimes the shooter commits, he sees the tiny details so easily obscured by fear and ambition.

Winter is not working alone. DS Rachel Narey, even though she has been pulled off the sniper case, realizes that more than just the obvious crimes lead back to the perpetrator. Soon it becomes clear that she, even pushed to the sidelines, may hold the best leads to understanding what hunts Glasgow.

Robertson’s characters do more than live in Glasgow; they inhabit the city in much the same way as some might a favourite room in a house, confident in every nook and cranny, comfortable in every square inch. They see the crime for what it is, a part of the world but not the whole of it. There is light to be found among the rain clouds, and humour even on the darkest nights, and, more than anything else, a strength in the knowledge of people and places and insight into where the answers may lie.

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