Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Blood Sugar

If diabetics need insulin to regulate their blood sugar, then Ruby needs murder to regulate the self-imposed ethical rules by which she lives her life. Just as she refuses to sleep with more men than her age (so, if she’s 24, she refuses to sleep with a 25th man until she turns 25), she finds that after a wide spread of time (about a decade or so), she finds the need to either commit or cause a death to happen. She doesn’t feel guilt, remorse, or concern over these deaths. To her, they simply needed to happen, so she ensured they did, and the world is better off without these people anyway. A bully when she’s 5. A rapist when she’s a young adult. A bigoted and violent woman who treats her employees like slaves once she’s fully grown and an established professional.

She’s either outright guilty of some form of murder or had a hand in the death in all three of these people, but what this book is about is the one death she had absolutely nothing to do with: the death of her husband, who died of low blood sugar in his sleep on the first night she had gotten a full night of deep sleep at home in what felt like forever after a week-long retreat on teaching Type-A personalities how to relax and let go.

Ruby has emotions like anyone else. The deaths she helped cause or had a hand in came about because, after internal analysis, she felt these people would only do more damage in the long run if they lived, so dying now would save everyone a whole lot of trouble. Hence why she carries no guilt or remorse over those deaths. They were, ultimately, necessary and a public service. No one ever need know. So she’s ultimately shocked and bemused when the police haul her in for her husband’s death when she had absolutely nothing at all to do with it. Type I diabetics die in their sleep from low blood sugar often enough there’s a moniker for it, “Dead in Bed”. That doesn’t stop her from being frozen in amber before she can even start her grieving process because the cops are laying the death at her door, despite the medical examiner’s findings that the husband died naturally of “Dead in Bed”.

What I loved about this book so much is how human Ruby is. Rothschild goes to great lengths to weave a completely mundane, intimate, almost-normal but somewhat-extraordinary personal life story for Ruby: adores her sister, higher-than-normal IQ, a preternatural talent for reading people she’s never even met before, a great judge of character, hates clutter, loves routine, her favorite color is purple and you will never change her mind, doesn’t second-guess herself, and once she sets on a path she doesn’t deviate. There are so many little things revealed here and there during the book that humanize Ruby we feel as if we’ve known her forever by the time the book ends. Heck! I wanted to be her friend! How human she is makes the things she’s done seem almost just like a quirk of hers–something she just needs to do to equalize herself every decade or so, and it’s always someone who really deserves it. I found myself going, “Well, honestly… I can’t say she was really all that wrong in what she did there.” Do I feel bad about thinking that? No, not really. Should I? I don’t even know at this point.

This book is a mind trip. It’s narrated in first-person POV, so I could write this off as unreliable narration. But I don’t. I don’t find Ruby to be unreliable. I don’t find she has the appropriate mens rea to be an unreliable narrator. No motive. She has no reason to lie to us readers. The plot has nothing to do with the crimes she actually committed: it has everything to do with the one crime she didn’t commit. And that’s the irony of it all. Rothchild could’ve gone for the jugular and wrote us the story of this serial killer in slow-motion, but instead we got the story of a grieving widow who had lived an incredibly interesting life and was being put on trial for the one murder she didn’t commit.

I highly recommend this sharp suspense mystery. It’s worth every page.

Thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Publishing Group, and G. P. Putnam’s Sons for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.