SOLVED. Bad crime fiction with autistic killer called Victor [s]

[Rachel]

A crime novel I read in the late 90s or early 2000s which was contemporary at the time.

It was a murder mystery where some chapters were told from the murderer's perspective but it wasn't revealed until the end who the murderer is. It turns out that the killer is a character called Victor who I think is the brother or son of one of the other characters. (Sorry for spoiler but let's face it, you could only identify the book if you had already read it so you would know this anyway!)

Victor is an autistic man and I remember even when I read it (in my late teens and had not met anyone with autism at that point) that the portrayal of this character was downright offensive. I think the author got autism confused with psychopathy or something, as he seemed to have no motivation for being a killer. It's a bad book, I just want to remember what it is.

Victor has a fixation with opposites and when he is upset says things like "enter out" and mentions the colour red, which he associates with being angry. I seem to remember the book having a lurid cover with a red and purple sunset, but I could have it mixed up with something else.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

I think this might be Live Flesh.

My review goes into a fair amount of detail:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Rachel]

Hi Lobstergirl. I don't think Live Flesh is what I am looking for, although there are some weird coincidences in the two plots.

The book I am looking for is set in the US, possibly in one of the southern states. The Victor character has not been convicted of any crime at the start of the book - it is meant to be a "shock twist" that he is the killer, although it's not hard for the reader to put it together in my opinion. Victor is explicitly described as severely autistic and I seem to remember is cared for by his mother and/or a sibling; at any rate there is no sense of him playing a cat and mouse game with anyone (as the character in Live Flesh seems to) - he is not that type of character.

In the book I am looking for, at least one of Victor's relatives is also a suspect for the murders at some point. I think his family is quite wealthy and they live in a large house (for some reason I am thinking colonial, but I could be misremembering). The narrative is not entirely in Victor's head - I think several chapters are from the POV of someone investigating the murders.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

How sure are you the MC is named Victor?

[Rachel]

I'm pretty sure. The weird thing is that Jill Dawson's book Wild Boy also has a character called Victor who is apparently autistic, and reading that book is what sparked my memory of the previous Victor. But it seems like a very weird coincidence that there are so many autistic Victors out there.

In short, if another book came up exactly matching the plot I described but the killer has a different name, I would be willing to admit my memory was wrong...

[Rachel]

OK, solved - it was A Thin Dark Line by Tami Hoag, and it was indeed another autistic Victor!

[Pamela]

Well, Wild Boy is based on a true story, about the so-called "wild boy of Aveyron", and the doctor who cared for him named him Victor, which in French has the second syllable sound much like a long o (as in hope) because the boy learned early that the French word "eau" (which is pronounced like a long o) was water. Thus, he would pay attention to his name. I suspect Tami Hoag consciously or unconsciously chose the name for that reason.