Easily the best crime novel I read last year, and probably for the last couple of years, Snap by Belinda Bauer was a propulsively enjoyable ripped-from-the-headlines yarn, with marvellous characters and a pitch-black sense of humour. Bauer came to our attention, and I expect many other people's, when Snap was included in the longlist for the Booker Prize. But it was just the latest in a line of her books, of which Rubbernecker demonstrates that its brilliance wasn't a one-off.
Similarly borrowed-from-the-front-pages, it centres around Patrick, an anatomy student in Wales, living away from home and dealing with the challenges of Asperger's Syndrome. Not that Patrick quite sees things that way - it's everyone else who's making all the simple things complicated (including his struggling, and now somewhat distant, mother). Instead, Patrick is focused on the exercise, together with a group of fellow students, of dissecting "Bill", their corpse for the semester, and something of a conundrum. "Bill's" cause of death is alluding them all, but a chance discovery by the preternaturally-focused Patrick sets him off on a chain of investigation away from the dissecting table. One that's unwarranted as far as his university is concerned, annoying for his fellow students, and which attracts unwelcome attention elsewhere as Patrick homes in on what really happened to "Bill".
Much as with Snap, this is a headily enjoyable read. Bauer is just excellent at drip-feeding the plot such that "just one more chapter ..." becomes a run of them. Her character sketches really help again, with a well-drawn cast of engaging and sympathetic characters, balanced with some frequently comical wrong-uns. Inevitably, one can't avoid some comparison with Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but Bauer's handling of Patrick is confident and Rubbernecker doesn't suffer. It helps that it doesn't turn into a heart-warming tale of Patrick's normalisation. The only bit of a misstep it takes is with the rather late-stage (and, arguably, tangential) revelations about his family - there needed to be something here, but this was a bit of an overlarge something for me.
Anyway, zero qualms in recommending this excellent read.
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