The stern, unbending attitude of the Kirk – ‘The records of the presbytery.exhibit a picture of wildness, ferocity and gross indulgence consistent with a state of savagism’ which their fierce God was there only to punish the pompous, self-satisfied beliefs of psychiatrist James Bruce Thomson, resident surgeon at the General Prison (asylum) in Perth – whose view of eugenics would have gone down well with the Nazis – are an indictment of the age. Oppressed and exploited by the major landowners, their factors and sub-agents, who regarded them as almost sub-human, their traditional clan structure destroyed, they had become what was expected of them to the point that any exception was regarded as remarkable and noteworthy.īurnet captures this brilliantly in his characterisation. Life for the crofters was often short, grim and brutal. It is Burnet’s masterful setting of them in their historical background that makes this awful tragedy so inevitable and compelling – and will leave readers wondering if the jury finally reached the correct conclusion.Īs a piece of social history, this powerful psychological drama buries once and for all the myth of the romantic Highlands.

These expose inconsistencies and omissions in Macrae’s story, pointing up not just the unreliability of individual witnesses, but also the complexity of the law’s duty in determining if an accused is insane or just evil. This narrative is followed by an extract from the ‘memoirs’ of the psychiatrist who examined him and an account of the trial using newspaper reports.

The known outcome lends his story a sense of foreboding. Macrae gives a starkly unromanticised account of the life of a 19th-century crofter. While awaiting trial, the boy wrote a detailed account of his life – the first time this full version has been seen – earlier published extracts concentrated solely on the more disturbing and sensationalist parts.

While researching his own family history, the author discovered the story of Roderick John Macrae, a 17-year-old from the crofter settlement of Culduie, Wester Ross, who committed a brutal triple murder. This assured and ingenious novel, based on a sensational and dramatic trial at Inverness in 1869, is a deeply imagined tale of persecution, tragedy, revenge and courtroom drama – noir historical fiction at its best.

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