Sascha Rothchild (How to Get Divorced by 30) draws readers into a suspenseful and disturbing character study of an unrepentant killer in Blood Sugar, her first novel.
It isn't Ruby Simon's fault people have a habit of turning up dead around her, even if she did murder them. When, at the age of five, she drowned a seven-year-old boy, she "waited for guilt to set in. But it never did." She did it to protect her sister, whom the boy bullied. As a teen, she felt no guilt for killing a friend's father when he tried to assault her. She's gotten away with it, until now. Thanks to the sudden death of Ruby's husband, Jason, Detective Keith Jackson has noticed the trail of bodies in her wake and is convinced she murdered her spouse. Caught in a game of cat and mouse, Ruby pleads her case to readers in chapters alternating between her past crimes and her present predicament. Of course she didn't kill her husband, she insists. She's only killed two people. Well, to be precise, she did kill a third victim and failed to mention it to readers up front. Still, even if she killed three people and lied to readers, she still wouldn't murder the man she loved and lie to readers. Honest.
Rothchild perfectly paces the shifts between humanizing her narrator to make her tension over the investigation sympathetic and dropping bombshell reminders that Ruby is a cold-blooded killer. This disturbing thriller begs to be inhaled in a single sitting. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads