BLOOD SUGAR

People keep dying around Ruby Simon, but she insists that doesn’t mean she’s always guilty. Should we take a confessed killer at her word?

Readers horrified by the opening scene, in which 5-year-old Ruby murders her 7-year-old schoolmate Duncan Reese, will soon be assured that it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Duncan was spoiled and mean and bullied Ruby’s sister, so her actions were excusable, if not heroic—at least in her eyes. The same can later be said of her friend’s predatory father and an awful therapy client nicknamed “the Witch,” both of whom meet their unfortunate demises with Ruby’s assistance. When Ruby’s husband dies, however, she insists she had nothing to do with it. Detective Keith Jackson disagrees, and he’s determined to find out why bodies keep piling up around Ruby. They face off, each attempting to outsmart the other, while Ruby regales readers with her side of the story. Sprinkled throughout are clues suggesting Ruby may not be the empathetic vigilante she pretends to be. “I waited for guilt to set in. But it never did,” she says about the first murder. In college, she majors in psychology hoping for some insight into her own behavior, and when she meets her monstrously narcissistic future mother-in-law, she wonders if perhaps they’re a little too much alike. Rothchild gives readers an unreliable narrator who truly lives up to the moniker. Is Ruby a sociopath or isn’t she? Was Jason’s death an accident, or did someone murder him? The answers are anything but straightforward.

A compelling and entertaining psychological thriller.