Fatal Rounds by Carrie RubinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Carrie Rubin’s Fatal Rounds was a delicious novel, rife with suspense and intrigue that, for me, found its feet just a little too late in the game.
Protagonist Liza Larkin is entering her residency in pathology at the Titus McCall Medical Center. She’s smart, driven and experiences the world through the lens of her self-described “schizoid personality disorder”. She relies on lifelong lessons from both her psychiatrist and her parents regarding appropriate social behaviors to guide her daily interactions, though Liza still misses important cues and is often perceived as “odd” and quirky. Additionally, she has had to learn to control her angry and sometimes violent outbursts, and long standing relationships for Liza are few and far between. Her mother resides in a private mental health facility, her father is deceased and her musician brother survives in a cloud of depression. When Liza’s mother experiences a particularly alarming “episode”, Liza discovers a shadowy man who appears in the background of a number of family photographs—photos that seem to have triggered her mother’s angst and most recent decline. Liza’s mission to discern the man’s identity is quickly realized, at which time she commits to discovering why he, Dr. Sam Donovan, is seemingly stalking her family. In the process, she finds far more than she bargained for, placing her career, her family and her own life in jeopardy.
Liking Liza as a character is a difficult ask. Her strengths and “humanity” are revealed so slowly that, for the first half of the book, there seems to be no context to who she is. Rubin opens by placing Liza in a setting that would have been far more powerful had the reader been given an opportunity to invest in her and understand her actions and reactions. It took too much of a concerted effort, and an inordinate number of pages, to unwind her motivations and situate them in terms of her own mental health challenges. Additionally, while her close relationship with her father appears to eclipse his death, neither his life, their connection, nor his passing are explored to the extent necessary to make Liza’s behaviors believable. Finally, the reader is, throughout, expected to buy into Liza’s constantly recalibrating moral compass—something I was never quite comfortable simply attributing to her personality disorder. The echoes of psychopathy in Liza reverberated far too loudly for her to be sympathetic.
Character challenges aside, the pages turned quickly, and I found myself invested in the outcome—which, for me, makes this a worthwhile read.
Thanks to Net Galley and Indigo Dot Press for providing me with an ARC for review. Fatal Rounds is slated for publication September 20, 2022.
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