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. She also manages to create a truly worthy adversary in Jason's mother, a narcissist whose disdain for Ruby makes readers want to forget the corpses and root for the young couple to succeed. Each time Ruby shows her true colors, she goes on to make readers slowly forget she's a villain again, showing her as a supportive friend, loving sister and devoted pet owner. Readers trying to separate Ruby's truths from her dissembling or even pin down her true motivations will find themselves outfoxed even as Detective Jackson draws closer to an arrest. Rothchild keeps the question of her possible role in Jason's death tantalizingly difficult to answer, offering enough clues to support or discredit Ruby. This disturbing thriller begs to be inhaled in a single sitting, but the experience may raise the question of how many friends and loved ones are quietly, happily getting away with murder. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: Although she's killed three people, an unreliable narrator insists she didn't murder her husband in this provocative, unsettling psychological thriller.