Murder is the dark stain at the heart of many a conventional mystery novel, but it also serves as a deadly effective tool in the hands of a writer who’s not interested in whether the butler (or the serial killer) did it, but why he did. Add to the canon of whydunits the grim and fascinating novel, presented in true-crime style, of a murder committed in Scotland nearly 150 years ago.

His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae, by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a coup that has taken Saraband, the tiny Scottish publishing house that put it out late last year, by surprise. It has been scrambling to print enough copies to meet demand. (His Bloody Project was published in the U.S. this month.)

This sleeper of a novel is veiled in deception. For starters, Burnet has given a part of his name to that of his murderer, Roderick Macrae, a 17-year-old boy arrested in 1869 for a brutal triple murder in his small seaside village. Burnet includes a “preface” in which he explains that he stumbled on the case while doing research on his own family. The book itself consists of various pertinent historical documents: medical reports, witness statements, court transcripts, and, most important, the firsthand account of the murders and the events leading up to them, written by the accused from his jail cell. (The language has a veneer of antiquity but is entirely accessible. A short glossary of Scottish words that Burnet includes is all the translation necessary.) In offering us various pieces of the puzzle without any neat, prefab conclusions, Burnet turns his readers into detectives.

But what is it, exactly, that we’re meant to uncover? There’s no dispute that “Roddy” Macrae is guilty: He confesses to the murder immediately, and he comes from the scene of the slaughter covered in the victims’ blood. (It’s a testament to the powerful hold that the gotcha formula has on our sense of narrative that for a while I found it impossible to accept that Roddy was the killer. It just seemed too obvious.)

In interviews Burnet has mentioned his deep admiration for the ultimate crime novel—Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—and it’s easy to see why he would find a character like the mad murderer Raskolnikov so fascinating. What makes a seemingly ordinary person, to use the term-of-art, “snap”? And is there any such thing as an ordinary person, anyway? Roddy’s character and motives are at the center of the mystery Burnet unspools—and his young antihero often seems as much at a loss for answers as anyone else.

Burnet’s first novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, set in in a backwater town in France, told the story of a man suspected in the disappearance and possible murder of a waitress at a beloved local café, and how the suspicion he was under rearranged the furniture of his own mind. It was a smaller novel, much of it sealed within the tight confines of the protagonist’s psyche and careful habits. As in His Bloody Project, Burnet wasn’t afraid to leave question marks where we might expect definitive answers.

The family research Burnet describes as the genesis for his current book may be a literary device, but he did immerse himself in the nineteenth-century Scottish agrarian system known as crofting, which wasn’t far removed from feudalism, to create the grim world that his young accused murderer inhabits. Roddy’s impoverished family is permitted to work a plot of land that they lease in a social arrangement ripe for abuse, and in which there’s little recourse for unfair treatment.

A passage in which Roddy describes a conversation that his father has with a local authority, known as the factor, underscores the hopeless absurdity of the crofting system for the average farmer, who must live in fear of violating unwritten laws. The factor explains:

The reason you may not “see” the regulations is because there are no regulations, at least not in the way you seem to think. You might as well ask to see the air we breathe. Of course, there are regulations, but you cannot see them. The regulations exist because we all accept that they exist and without them there would be anarchy. It is for the village constable to interpret these regulations and enforce them at his discretion.

But there are more layers to peel back. A criminal profiler (whose theories are based, Burnet says, on the work of real-life pioneering criminologist J. Bruce Thomson) has his own conclusions about the accused’s motives. And then there’s the possibility, dangled by Roddy’s optimistic lawyer, of an insanity defense. How is insanity to be defined, and what constitutes its proof? In a Scottish courtroom, where emerging modern legal concepts are brought to bear on a rural backdrop that appears little removed from medieval times, how is justice to be meted out?

Years ago, I served on a jury for a robbery and assault case that seemed composed of nothing but holes and contradictions and unreliable witnesses. We reluctantly found the defendant not guilty. The tremendous letdown I felt when, after we rendered that verdict, we simply went home, made me realize how thoroughly our narrative culture has primed us to expect comprehensive answers, final explanations, wrap-ups. The seduction of many crime stories is that they offer all the answers we don’t get in real life. His Bloody Project reminds us that there are other pleasures to be drawn from a superb novel that revolves around the act of murder.

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