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What it argues
Patrick Fort is a student with autism spectrum disorder studying anatomy at Cardiff University. He is intensely logical, detail-oriented, and unable to read social signals in the way his peers do — all of which makes him very good at noticing things that others would overlook or dismiss. When his dissection group works on the body of a middle-aged man, Patrick becomes convinced the man did not die of natural causes. No one takes him seriously. The authority figures around him explain it away; his peers find him strange; the institution has its own reasons for not looking too hard. Patrick keeps looking anyway.
Belinda Bauer runs a second narrative alongside Patrick's: a locked-in patient in a care home, Sam, who is dimly aware of the world around him and of something wrong in the building where he is confined. The two storylines converge in a way that's earned rather than arbitrary, and the shift between Patrick's hyper-literal perception of the world and Sam's fragmentary consciousness gives the novel unusual range. Bauer is one of the few crime writers who can write from inside a radically different cognitive experience without it feeling like a gimmick.
What it gets right
- 1.
Patrick's autism is written from inside the experience — the hypersensitivity, the logic, the genuine difficulties — rather than observed from outside as a set of quirks.
- 2.
The dissection-room setting is used both literally and metaphorically: the novel is about what you find when you look closely at things people prefer not to examine.
- 3.
Sam's locked-in consciousness narrative is one of the more technically ambitious things Bauer attempts, and it largely succeeds.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Belinda Bauer is a British crime novelist who grew up in England and South Africa. She won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Blacklands, her debut novel, making her one of the youngest-ever winners of that prize. Her novels are notable for dark, surprising premises and for finding fresh perspectives on crime — including multiple works told from the point of view of killers, victims, or cognitively different protagonists. Rubbernecker, published in 2013, won the CWA Gold Dagger as well. She lives in Wales.
