This remarkable Scottish true-crime book is full of pain and pathos

A Granite Silence is something else. At one level it’s a true crime story, including Allan’s recreation of the events of a child’s murder and her own revisiting the scene of the crime. On another it is an act of imaginative immersion as Allan fictionalises parts of the story. Some might take issue with the very idea, but there is so much empathy and so much love in the telling. This is a remarkable book full of pain and pathos that takes a historical murder and holds it up to a refracted lens and then watches as the light scatters.