A former Marine and ex-FBI agent, Joe has seen one too many crime scenes and known too much trauma, and not just in his professional life. Solitary and haunted, he prefers to be invisible. He doesn’t allow himself friends or lovers and makes a living rescuing young girls from the deadly clutches of the sex trade.

But when a high-ranking New York politician hires him to extricate his teenage daughter from a Manhattan brothel, Joe uncovers a web of corruption that even he may not be able to unravel.

When the men on his trail take the only person left in the world who matters to him, he forsakes his pledge to do no harm. If anyone can kill his way to the truth, it’s Joe…

‘You Were Never Really Here’ is sixty-five pages of focused, brutal violence. It tells the story of a man who has suffered traumas that have so broken him and left him so afraid of his own potential for violence that he has isolated himself, minimising his contact with people, leaving almost no trace as he moves through his days. He has turned himself into something as simple and dangerous as the hammer that is his weapon of choice. The title refers to Joe’s view of himself as a man passing through the world without truly being a part of it.

Joe’s only reason for continuing to live is to turn the violence that is always trying to burst out of him, into a tool he wields against those who traffick the children he is covertly commissioned to rescue. Part of Joe’s trauma comes from his years as an undercover FBI agent breaking human trafficking gangs. Now he uses the knowledge he gained from that work, but without having to keep his violence leashed while he does it. 

The violence starts on the first page. There is neither joy nor rage in it, just necessity. The prose, like the protagonist, is lean, muscular and brutal. The pace is relentless rather than fast. The tone is bleak. The action scenes are vivid.

This isn’t a story of redemptive heroics. It’s the story of a man who has made himself into a hammer and who sees every obstacle as a nail. 

---

In 2017, Lynne Ramsay adapted this novella into a film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts and Ekaterina Samsonov. Click on the YouTube link below to see the trailer.