A Thousand Cuts was published in the US as Rupture
A Thousand Cuts is a thoughtful condemnation of the institutions and people that condone bullying and an examination of the aftermath of a school shooting that comes as a result of bullying wrapped in a crime novel.
In a show of restraint the more blatant of the crimes in this book, the actual shooting event, is never shown. The book opens with the Inspector walking through the halls of the school and the auditorium where it took place surveying the damage and imagining the crime take place.
The rest of the book will follow two paths.
The first path is told in the third person and follows the Inspector’s investigation. Her chief obstacle, and the first institution who blocks her way, are the suits. Her boss and his bosses make it expressly clear that she is to wrap this thing up quickly and put a nice neat bow on it since the shooter offed himself. Like any crime fiction detective worth her salt though she just can’t let it go or bend to the will of her superiors. So she pushes on. I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the Inspector is in any way a cliché by that joke though. She becomes an increasingly sympathetic character as she herself is subjected to institutional and vulgar harassment (the grownup word for bullying) that ranges from subtle verbal digs to a frightening assault in the parking lot.
The second path is a series of first person monologues of the various people the Inspector interviews. What we are reading are the actual field interviews. The voices of all of these characters are told in the first person and are as varied as the characters themselves. Through these characters – students, faculty, administrative personnel, parents – we begin to assemble the pieces to get a fuller and more complex picture of what happened at the school on that day. The complexity of this will further put the Inspector at odds with the investigation they WANT her to conduct.
By the end what we see is how various forces, by accident and design, collude to foster an environment where such a tragedy is possible. A Thousand Cuts is as strong a debut as you are likely to find this year and is a powerful novel that offers no easy answers.
