BESLAN still comes sometimes in my sleep. The freshly dug graves. The photographs of young faces tagged to small wooden crosses. The blood and flesh smeared on the walls of School No 1. But leaving the massacre in Beslan in September 2004 is straightforward for reporters; it's far from easy for those in the southern Russian town who still live with daily reminders of the school massacre. The terrorist attack at the school targeted the innocent, subjecting them to inhumane suffering over three days in the school gymnasium. A botched security-force operation at the end of the siege only added to its bloody conclusion which left at least 331 people dead, many of them children. No adequate explanation has yet emerged to explain why Chechen rebels targeted School No 1.

The attack is wrapped up in local hatreds and the depravity of human nature. Finding some semblance of truth has not been a priority for the Putin government. The voices of the loved ones of the Beslan dead have been given little import in the Kremlin corridors of power. In his new book, Timothy Phillips gives many of these people an opportunity to tell their stories.

There are chilling recollections of the hours after the attackers arrived and seized over 1,200 men, women and children, taking the reader back to the gymturned-prison and the depravity foisted upon those held captive.

The book is a successful retelling of the Beslan story insofar as the three-day siege is concerned.

But it tells us little beyond what is already known. The outline of the story will be familiar to most.

Phillips never develops the central characters in his narrative. The book is also devilled by an awkward structure in which chapters alternate between the narrative of the school siege and history lessons from the southern Caucasus.

But the biggest disappointment - and the book's greatest weakness - is the author's failure to do justice to the period after the siege. Insufficient space is allocated to the various inquiries undertaken, including a parliamentary commission in Moscow. Too many unanswered questions are discussed in a handful of paragraphs. An author taking a more forensic approach to the available evidence would most likely have delivered a better book about what happened in School No 1.