This short stinging novel uses three narrative methods to triangulate a story that already happened, and the movement of the book is to reveal what is taking place, what took place, whose head we are in, and when. As a child I seemed to favor those books like House of Stairs that presupposed the worst about people and society, books that suggested that adults were lying to hide a vast evil conspiracy with which they are more or less compliant.

This turns out to be true.

There is no way to describe this book I can see that won't reveal some of the dark mystery that makes it at first frustrating and in the end terribly irresistibly terrifying. So I guess I can't dwell on how a book can get serious momentum derived from a secret never fully revealed, how it's believable that a child could be killed for what they might know about the government, how the imagination can stand in for a plot that must be so complex as to be indecipherable. Broad strokes, shortcuts, everything that could be lazy plotting in a less well-wrought fiction here instead serve a purpose, a poison-tipped razor.