Bloody project: The little masterpiece that saw off literary beasts

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.