While stories about blood and gore are nice, nothing is quite as fascinating as getting into the mind of a killer. Most mystery books operate on this theory — there is a murder (or a robbery or whatever) and then you search for the culprit and along the way you discover what motive he or she could have had to do it.
But suppose the culprit is already spelt out for you? The murder is an open and shut case? Suppose you begin by hating the killer but by the end of it, you think you’d do exactly the same thing in his case? Rupture by Simon Lelic is that sort of book. A teacher, Samuel Szajkowksi (don’t even bother trying to learn how to pronounce that) pulls out a gun in assembly one day and shoots five people, some students, one teacher. We don’t know whether he meant to shoot that many people, we don’t know why he did, except that he snapped. Why he snapped is something that is occupying police officer Lucia May’s mind. Even when her superior kicks her off the case she continues to investigate, and that’s how the book is laid out — May’s thoughts interspersed with first person monologues of the people she interviews.
I couldn’t find much about Lelic on the Internet, but I do know that Rupture is his first book, which surprised me. The writing is even, mature and speaks of someone who has done this countless times before. There’s none of that self-conscious writing for an audience thing that first time novelists tend to do.
What I also liked about Rupture is that it started out as a crime-solving book, where you enter the mind of the killer but the underlying theme became obvious only later. This is a book about bullying, and dragging out some of his other reviews off the web, it seems that everyone agrees with me. While investigating Szajkowski’s ultimate breakdown (interviewing the kids that tormented him and so on) May herself is being harassed, quite severely, by a colleague. As one of the only women constables, she feels hesitant about reporting this and I also have to tip my hat to Lelic for creating a very believable female voice. I forgot, halfway through the book, that it was written by a man and so when I closed it, his name surprised me all over again.
We read and hear a lot about violence in schools and pupils who go crazy one day. But we almost never feel sympathy for the killers or wonder why they got that way in the first place. Reading Rupture will do that for you, I liked it immensely, it got under my skin in the way few books do.
The columnist is an author