In the media's digests of the novels longlisted for this year's Man Booker prize, His Bloody Project was cast as the underdog. Graeme Macrae Burnet's second novel, published by a tiny Scottish press, received almost no newspaper reviews when it came out last year. Now it has been cheered for seeing off various big literary beasts nourished by the marketing budgets of metropolitan publishing houses, and, even more remarkably, has done so despite the handicap of being a genre novel.His Bloody Project opens with Burnet announcing in a preface that what follows is a collection of documents relating to a murder trial he read about while researching his family history. The defendant was Roddy Macrae, a 17-year-old boy living in the remote crofting community of Culduie in Rossshire, who, in 1869, beat the local constable Lachlan Mackenzie and two other people to death.Burnet claims to have found, in the bowels of the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, a manuscript which Roddy is supposed to have written at his lawyer's behest while awaiting trial. Roddy's account of events leading up to the crime takes up more than half the book, and it is an astonishing piece of writing.Articulate, unworldly, regarded as exceptionally intelligent by his schoolteacher and akin to the village idiot by other Culduie residents, Roddy paints a picture of life with his tyrannical father and the campaign of intimidation waged against him by Lachlan Mackenzie, in a voice that sounds startlingly authentic.The rest of the book comprises witness statements from other Culduie residents, an extract from a (fictional) investigation by the (real) pioneering criminologist James Bruce Thomson, and finally an account of Roddy's trial supposedly collated from newspaper reports.The trial scenes are up to the excitement of a Scott Turow novel, but the second half of the book can't help but lack the intensity of the part narrated by Roddy.There is no gainsaying the ingenuity with which Burnet has constructed his puzzle, even if ultimately he doesn't divulge everything in his answer-book. But it is as a feat of characterisation and narrative skill that the book should be applauded. - © The Daily Telegraph BOOK BITES£500000 - the amount that a bejewelled once-off edition of JK Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard is expected to fetch at auction next month. The book is one of seven presentation copies that Rowling gave to the people who were early believers in her Harry Potter books. It was given to editor Barry Cunningham who signed the author up almost 20 years ago when no one else would give her a chance. The last time one of the copies went on auction, in 2007, it fetched £1.95-million.Brexit - announced last week by Collins as the word of the year. The dictionary publisher said that while the word first entered popular usage in 2013, its usage ahead of the referendum earlier this year increased by 3400%.Love Books in Melville - which tonight hosts ''The Night of the Playwrights," featuring John Kani, Craig Higginson, Neil Coppen and Harry Kalmer in conversation from 6.30pm. - Tymon Smith..