Read This Book: A Thousand Cuts

"It should have been an open and shut case."

But such cases - "open and shut" without question and without doubt - are rare, if not altogether non-existent.  We like facts. -Who-What-Where-When.-  When these questions are are answered we feel secure.  We know what is going on. 

But Truth is often more slippery than Facts.  The question -Why- makes us uneasy.  Digging too deeply into why can cause us to loose our place.

The novel, A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic (Published in Great Britain as Rupture) is a disturbing and difficult book - not because the prose is dense or because the vocabulary is obscure, but because it dares to dig into the why.

Detective Inspector Lucia May - the only female  in her office - is tasked to piece together the various testimonies and eyewitness accounts after Samuel Szajkowski - a recently hired history teacher - walked into a school assembly with a gun and murdered three students and a teacher before turning it upon himself.  It should have been an open and shut case. 

But

once Detective May is beyond the Facts of the case and looking into the why the Truth of the case becomes increasingly uncomfortable to her.  And what makes the situation even more intolerable for her is that no one, not even her boss, is interested in the Truth.

"Your job is to pick up the pieces.  To tidy them away.  Not to chuck them about the room just because your hormones are bubbling over and you're looking for someone to get mad at."
Lucia folded her arms.  She unfolded them, put her hands on her hips.  She glared at Cole.  Cole glared back.
"So?" he said.
"So? So what?"
"So are you going to rewrite [this report]?  Are you going to do this department, me, and yourself a favor?

It's easier to look at the surface. To call him a monster. To file the paperwork and to move on.

The American title -A Thousand Cuts, refers to a form of torture and execution in ancient China whereby the condemned person was slowly killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time.