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Content snapshot
Flag an inaccuracy →What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.
Violence
A triple homicide, including a child and a teenage girl, described by the killer in plain and specific terms
Language
Some
Period-accurate rather than profane
Sexual Content
A lot
Sexual coercion and humiliation of a young woman by the village constable form part of Roderick's stated motive, and the novel carries an explicit-sexual-content tag from readers
Substance Use
Some
Heavy drinking among the crofters, treated as an unremarkable feature of the setting
Emotional Intensity
Very heavy
Sustained hopelessness: destitution, an evicted family, a mother's death, and an extended argument about whether the killer was mad or simply cornered
What this book is about
Seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae kills three neighbours in Culduie in 1869 — a man, his teenage daughter, and a young boy — and Burnet presents the case as a dossier of memoir, medical reports, trial transcripts, and press coverage. Reader-supplied tags on the novel flag graphic violence and explicit sexual content, and TheBibliophage's review describes a community where "violence is just a part of life," with grinding poverty and an Edinburgh alienist whose classism the reviewer calls reprehensible. The murders themselves are recounted in flat, unsparing first person, which is more disturbing than a stylized account would be. Booker-shortlisted in 2016.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Detailed first-person account of murdering a child and a teenage girl
Sexual coercion as motive
Unrelenting poverty and class cruelty
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