His Bloody Project

His Bloody Project is a novel by the Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, published in 2015. It is written as a collection of documents rather than as a single narrative, and it presents itself as an assembled case file rather than as a story told from one point of view.

The crime at its centre takes place in a crofting community in the Highlands in 1869. A young man is arrested and a memoir in his own words is recovered from him, and what he says in it removes the question of whether he committed the killings.

What remains is the question the novel is actually about. Roderick Macrae's account sets out the circumstances of his life, his family's position in a small and tightly ordered community, and his dealings with the village constable and the other two people who died. Alongside it the book assembles testimony, trial transcripts and newspaper reports, including the arguments of an advocate who has to decide whether to plead insanity. Because each witness sees the same events differently, the reader is left to weigh evidence that the documents themselves do not resolve.