Thanks to reading Snap by Belinda Bauer  (because it was on the recently released Man Booker Long List for 2018) I thought I’d look into other books by her – she has several priors.    One looked interesting and I put it on my wishlist.  Then some members of the 4-Mystery Addicts reading group mentioned it favorably in their posts. That settled it.   It got pushed up my own list and I read it when I got a break from group reads and urgent nonfiction.  (heh)

*******
Rubbernecker
by Belinda Bauer  (England)
2015 / 434 pages
read by Andrew Wincott
rating:   B+  /  suspense-crime
*******

It’s not as good as Snap but it’s pretty good for a suspense novel.

The protagonist,  Patrick Fort,  is studying with a medical program at Cardiff University in Wales for the purposes of learning anatomy.    He lives with a small group of his fellow students.

The class dissects cadavers which have been donated for the purpose.  The thing making this crime novel really different is that Patrick has Asperger’s Syndrome so he takes most  things people say literally and has to get answers to his questions.  He has a few obsessions, too –  like how his father died and what death actually is – where the people go.

One day he realizes that the cadaver which he is dissecting did not die of heart failure but was more likely murdered.  He really has to find out what happened and that gets to be a rather dicey series of investigative adventures.

There are plenty of interesting and intertwined characters here, but it’s not really a who-done-it,  that,  and a few other things, are revealed gradually (either that or I guessed it pretty early on).  The more interesting factors are the difficulties of Asperger’s Syndrome as well as amateur murder investigation –  it has a nice little shading of humor as well.

What’s up tomorrow?   I don’t honestly know.