Full Cover
Design approach
Concept
Crime fiction is bought fast, often at thumbnail size, so the cover had to read as a genre signal before anyone reads a word. A single figure walking away into a compressed city canyon does that work: the reader is following someone, and the street is closing in.
Wrap
Torn red masking runs behind the photography and continues past the spine onto the back cover, so the wrap reads as one image rather than two unrelated sides. The blurb sits on the calm part of that field, with a second, colder image at the base to break the block of text.
Typography
The title is set in a high-contrast serif at large scale and broken over three lines, which keeps it legible when the whole cover shrinks to a few hundred pixels. The handwritten strapline is the only informal element, and it carries the 'home' half of the title.