Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize The year is 1869. After a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae is arrested for the crime. A memoir written by the accused makes ...

Whoever nominated this book for our Halloween read deserves a round of applause. What makes Burnet's novel about the brutal murder of the Mackenzie family incredible is that it is not about the questions you would expect to see in a crime thriller; from the beginning of the novel, we know that the crime happened and we know exactly who did it. The key question of the novel is WHY Macrae committed the three murders, and Burnet lets us investigate that mystery by combing through the documents written contemporaneously at the time of fictional crime. There is a wonderful diversity of types of content from court records to forensic analyses, and Barnet plays his 18th century setting to the hilt by bringing in the prejudices, local politics, and 'new' crime theories of the period to paint a picture of the killer's sleepy, gossip-filled world. The book does a wonderful job of keeping the reader on their toes, alternating between evidence that justifies Macrae's violence and evidence that makes Macrae look thoroughly monstrous. We especially liked the ambiguities that Barnet forces the reader to face, a favorite of ours being that one of the clearest views and keenest analyses of the crime comes from a phrenologist, who 'science' is so clearly nonsense to a modern reader. It is devilishly wonderful how Barnet keeps changing our feelings about Macrae, continually making us culpable in this crime by having us sympathize with him exactly in the way he is wants to manipulate us (or is he?) Disturbing, elusive, and well written, His Bloody Project is a rare book that will wow you with its style and scar you with its horror in a wholly original way.