Will I love Rubbernecker?

I'm amazed that more people haven't put Belinda Bauer up there with the top crime novelists. She's won plenty of awards, but her stuff should be mentioned along with Tana French, Val McDermid, Benjamin Black, and old hands like James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane. Rubbernecker takes a wonderfully slim and elegant premise - a neurodivergent anatomy student is convinced that the cadaver he's dissecting was a murder victim. There's more, which I won't spoil, but the point is that her characters are wonderfully fleshed-out and real, and the suspense as taut as a good thriller should be. Add to… show more.

I've never read a book quite like this. It was a little challenging to get into, but by the time I finished, I was blown away by the author's talent.

The character-driven plot makes whiplash-inducing twists and turns from several points of view. The reader is first drawn into the mind of a comatose patient who is slowly regaining consciousness and thinks he sees his roommate being murdered.

Next, we're following Patrick Fort, a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome, who has won a disability scholarship to study anatomy at Cardiff University. Patrick has spent the last ten years fixated on finding… show more.