Given Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deranged and unhelpful views on autism, this British novel about a detective on the autism spectrum couldn’t be timelier. Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist invites us into the mind of Detective Sergeant George Cross, who has this diagnosis (Sullivan calls it Asperger’s, but that was dropped from the D.S.M. more than a decade ago), and shows how it makes him an excellent detective with the highest solve record at the police department in Bristol. His ability to identify and process patterns, his need for order, his eye for the anomaly, and his obsession with detail are all professionally useful aspects of his personality and intellect. His colleagues can find him challenging because of his obliviousness to social cues, but obviously this man is a valuable member of society, not someone who should be marginalized —or, worse, never have been born.
Don’t get the wrong idea about the title—the dentist is not a sadistic villain out of Marathon Man but a murder victim. Because he is a badly beaten homeless man without any ID, it takes a while for George to determine his former occupation. But his body has some physical signs of a better life before he ended up on the streets, which helps George and his team figure out who he is, which in turn leads to a suspect who admits to bashing the victim in the face.
