Those words seemed worth revisiting as I reviewed His Bloody Project – at odds with his debut in almost every aspect (historical, not modern Scotland, not France non-linear epistolary narrative, not plain crime) – and yet just as masterful, clever and playful. Describing it then, I declared it ‘a masterful character study with a metafictional impulse…a clever beast indeed’. Graeme Macrae Burnet first came to our attention last year, fresh off the success of his Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the publication of his debut novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. Roddy’s story unfolds amid the competing voices of his own prison memoir, court testimony, newspaper cuttings and police statements – a tragic and unsettling whydunnit that provides the reader with no easy answers. He stands calmly in the road, covered in their blood, and informs his neighbours of what he has done. 1869: 17-year-old Roderick ‘Roddy’ Macrae has just brutally murdered three people in the remote Scottish village of Culduie.
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