It’s only a story — or is it? Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells in HIS BLOODY PROJECT (Skyhorse, $24.99), a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives. Presented as a collection of “Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae,” which took place in 1869, the novel includes the jailhouse memoir of a 17-year-old Scottish Highlander being held in Inverness Castle, awaiting trial for three appalling murders.

Roderick and his family brave feudal conditions, toiling as tenant farmers on a small allotment, harvesting peat for fuel and scavenging seaweed to fertilize their gardens. It’s a hard existence, made even harder by Lachlan Mackenzie, a vindictive constable who systematically strips the Macraes of their livelihood. When father and son bravely take their grievances to the factor, the man charged with running the estate on behalf of the laird, he cruelly dismisses their request to see the regulations they’re accused of violating. “The reason you may not ‘see’ the regulations is because there are no regulations,” he informs them. “You might as well ask to see the air we breathe.”

After being goaded beyond endurance, Roderick seeks out his tormentor while carrying a croman (a pickax) and a flaughter (a pointed spade), “merely to discover what would happen if I paid a visit to his house thus armed.” At moments like this, we begin to suspect that Roderick isn’t the most trustworthy of narrators.

For a “semiliterate peasant,” he has recorded a testament so “sustained and eloquent” that the Edinburgh literati suspect a hoax. Not so Roderick’s lawyer, Andrew Sinclair, who marvels at the prisoner’s graceful writing and command of language even as he’s sickened by the conditions under which people like the Macraes must toil. But the lawyer’s defense may not be enough to counter the contemptuous testimony of men like the bigoted prison surgeon, J. Bruce Thomson, who contributes his own sour observations to the medical reports and witness statements presented in court. Thomson’s examination of the prisoner confirms his view that criminal behavior is determined by heredity. In Macrae’s case, though, what might be inherited is sheer desperation.