The Break-In by Scott Skinner — book cover
A novel

The Break-In

Thieves break into Tim's home, and a bad week becomes a desperate deal with the wrong man. A taut, first-person account of seven days to hold it together — or not.

Format
Kindle & paperback
Kindle
$2.99
Paperback
$13.99
Genre
Literary fiction
The synopsis

An ordinary life, coming quietly undone.

The break-in is the easy part. What follows is a week Tim can't get ahead of — a debt to the wrong man, a marriage he's managing instead of living, and the small, accumulating lies that hold a life together until they don't.

Told in the first person by a narrator the writing refuses to protect, The Break-In renders panic through behavior rather than melodrama: the deleted bank app, the toys on the floor, the syrup smell, the freeway home. It's about the distance between the man Tim meant to be and the one making the calls at 2 a.m. — and it doesn't tie a bow on any of it.

"It was like I was living on a floodplain. Everything I loved might get swept away."
What's inside

Deadpan, specific, unflinching.

Debt & deception

Money trouble rendered as dread — the calls you avoid, the apps you delete, the truth you keep just out of frame.

Domestic precision

A marriage and a household observed in clinical, tender detail. The weight lands in the ordinary objects.

Bay Area noir

680 at night, Mt. Diablo on the horizon, sound walls and Safeway light. Place doing real emotional work.

Seven days. The wrong man. No easy way out.

Kindle $2.99 · Paperback $13.99