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.

The novel is composed of various documents relating to three grisly murders committed in a Highland village in 1869. In his preface, Burnet attempts to pass off fiction as fact, informing us that he ‘came across’ the book’s main narrative, ‘The Account of Roderick Macrae’, in an archive