Malcolm Forbes
Murder Most Foul
His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae
By Graeme Macrae Burnet
Contraband 280pp £8.99 order from our bookshop
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s debut novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), was a taut psychological mystery set in a small provincial French town. His follow-up, the more ambitious yet also more accomplished His Bloody Project, is another literary thriller set in a rural backwater, only this time Burnet plays closer to home in his native Scotland and drills even deeper into the human psyche to explore not just the evil that men do but also their motivations for doing it.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Too many historians sneer at our forbears; scolding them if they follow the customs of their own day ... tut-tutting if the poor things are detected having a little fun.'
From the archive, Mary Clive on medieval travellers.
http://ow.ly/yk8a50yrjSG
'Reading Taylor’s book has also made me join a book club. I did not like the January book; I did enjoy drinking gin while saying why.'
@clamorousvoice explores the history of women readers.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-readers
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO