Samuel Szajkowski, a 27 year old history teacher, one day during a hot summer walks into assembly and shoots three pupils and a teacher before killing himself. It is DI Lucia May’s task to investigate the shooting and interview witnesses before filing the official report. On the surface it is an open and shut case, but Lucia starts to uncover the events leading up to Szajkowski’s actions and it makes her question who, really, was at fault.

Rather than uncover a disturbed family history – though it is true that Szajkowski grew up in a children’s home, and is hopeless with women – she instead discovers a culture of endemic bullying at the school. A particularly violent streak of bullying too, with one little boy having been brutally attacked and subsequently hospitalized. The bullying is also going on amongst the staff, and, we learn, outside of the school too. Lucia is a victim of increasingly horrible sexual harrassment by a colleague.

‘Find what you were looking for, Inspector?’

Every day the same question. A different uniform but the same question. They thought Lucia enjoyed being here. They thought that was why she kept coming back. But they were asking the wrong thing. She had found what she was looking for – she had found what she had been sent to discover – but she had found out more besides. The question was what to do about it. The question was whether to do anything at all.

At the very heart of it, Rupture by Simon Lelic (publishing in the US in March as A Thousand Cuts) is a crime novel, but to say that feels too narrow, too constricted. Yes, there are police procedural elements, and yes perhaps there is something of a cliche about Lucia – the cop going against orders at work and failing to hold together a relationship at home – but more important than that, this is a novel that turns preconceived ideas on their head, and it does it in a very clever way.

I’ve seen several people compare it to We Need to Talk About Kevin, but I think that’s true only insofar as it features a school shooting and it questions the motivations behind such a barbaric act. Rupture is quite different. For one, and most obviously, it is a teacher who commits the crime, and that automatically makes one think differently about what could have caused him to do this. Secondly, the novel gradually invokes more sympathy for Szajkowski and more anger towards other characters, which is a complex thing in itself. Surely, regardless of motivation, Szajkowski is still accountable for his murderous actions? So why am I feeling so sorry for him? All human life, and emotion, is, as they say, here in Rupture.

I flew through this book in less than 48 hours. It made for uncomfortable reading at points – very, very uncomfortable reading – but it is a fantastic novel, genuinely unputdownable. I was astonished to find out that it is Simon Lelic’s debut because it has such a distinctive voice, and is written with such confidence, that it felt like the work of someone with several novels behind them. He’s certainly going to be one to watch.