Sam Galen is badly injured in a car crash. A long time later, he wakes up in a neurological ward just on time to witness another patient's murder at the hands of a doctor. But Sam can barely move his eyes voluntarily, much less report what he saw. To make matters worse, a woman he doesn't recognise keeps visiting and calling herself his wife.
Patrick Fort is an eighteen-year-old medical student with Asperger's. He and several other students are tasked with dissecting a cadaver to determine its cause of death. Patrick becomes convinced that the official cause of death is wrong and the man was murdered.
Rubbernecker contains examples of:
- Anachronic Order: The chapters following Sam in the coma ward take place before the chapters following Patrick. Sam is murdered and becomes Patrick's cadaver.
- The Baby Trap: Tracy starts sleeping with Mr Deal and stops taking her birth control in order to trap him into a relationship. It works — when Tracy tells Mr Deal she's pregnant, he turns one of his spare bedrooms into a nursery and buys a crib, toys, and baby clothes. Tracy hates the effect that pregnancy has on her figure, but she looks forward to quitting her job, and she's sure that once her daughter is born she'll lose the weight and enjoy her life as a rich man's wife.
- Batter Up!: When Patrick was eight, a bully punched him and knocked him off the monkey bars. Patrick followed the bully to the swings and smashed him with a rounders bat just as he was swooping down, causing him to somersault off the swing.
- Bully Magnet: When Patrick first started primary school, he and the other children mostly ignored each other. Then he decided to try to make friends, which led to his classmates calling him names and hiding his things to upset him. The stress affected Patrick's behaviour at home, and his parents used to get in arguments about him.
- Car Fu:
- The killer knocks Patrick off his bike with a car, then tries to run him down again. Patrick runs into a car park, realising too late that he made a mistake in going somewhere with no witnesses. The killer chases him onto the second floor, where Patrick looks over the wall and sees witnesses below. He jumps over the wall right before the car slams into it, falls through the branches of a nearby tree, and lands mostly uninjured.
- When Patrick was eight, his mum was driving drunk and tried to run him over with her car. She hit her husband instead.
- Comforting The Widower: Mr Deal isn't really a widower — his wife has been in a coma for almost a year — but the nurse Tracy Evans sets out to seduce him anyway. When Mr Deal is around, she plays up what a caring and attentive nurse she is for Mrs Deal, even though she's lazy and careless when no one is watching.
- Converse with the Unconscious: People are always coming into the coma ward to talk to patients in the hopes of waking them up. At one point four karate club members do a routine, complete with yells, for their comatose friend.
- Death Is a Sad Thing: Patrick's father died when he was eight. Patrick didn't understand that death means a person has disappeared forever — he thought his father must have gone somewhere and spent the next year asking obsessively, 'What happened to Daddy?' This led into a years-long fascination with death. Patrick would collect, examine, and dissect dead animals and watch footage of horses dying in racing accidents. He decided to study anatomy in order to better understand death. By the end of the book, Patrick has learned the real reason his father died, allowing him to achieve closure and stop obsessing over death.
- Dies Wide Open: Patrick's father was killed in a hit-and-run. Bystanders tried to block his view of the body, but he still got a glimpse of his father's open, staring eyes.
- Does Not Drive: Patrick is good at fixing cars, but can't drive. Instead he rides his bicycle or walks.
- Fainting: Patrick's classmate Rob, who's considering surgery, faints when the group first cuts into the cadaver. He does better in future sessions.
- Finger-Twitching Revival: Tracy is annoyed by this trope because comatose people make random movements and noises all the time, and every time a patient twitches their loved ones think they're about to recover.
- Flipping the Bird: The students play around with the tendons in the cadaver's wrist to cause his hand to make different gestures. Scott makes him flip Meg off.
- Forgets to Eat: Patrick's mother Sarah reminds him to eat during their phone calls. Patrick says he won't forget, even though he sometimes does.
- Guilty Pleasure: Meg volunteers to read to Mrs Deal. She starts reading Ulysses, but gets bored with it and switches to The Da Vinci Code, which she describes to her friends as 'some rubbish that I found on her bedside table'. The book turns out to be so gripping that Meg finds herself reading to Mrs Deal for two hours at a time instead of one, but she'd never admit that.
- Handshake Refusal: At the victim's funeral, DS Williams tries to shake Patrick's hand, but Patrick sees it coming and dodges him.
- Happiness in Minimum Wage: Patrick gets a job washing dishes at a pub. He loves the work and is so fast and efficient that the chef cooks him a free meal once a shift to thank him for reducing the number of customer complaints. He also comes up with a system to prevent them from running out of teaspoons. He likes his job so much that when Professor Madoc and Mick Jarvis offer him a job as trainee lab technician, he turns them down.
- Hates Being Touched: Patrick has a violent hatred of physical contact. He eventually learns to tolerate it for short periods of time, although he still dislikes it.
- Interrupted Suicide: After solving the case, Patrick comes home to find a note from Sarah that says that things have been 'very difficult' for her, tells him where to find her will, asks for his forgiveness, and tells him to take care of her cat Ollie. Confused, he shows the note to Weird Nick, who tells him it's a suicide note. Sarah has told Patrick that she once considered jumping off of Penyfan, so Patrick and Weird Nick drive there. When they arrive, Weird Nick realises that he is still wearing slippers, so Patrick climbs the mountain by himself. He finds Sarah sitting near the summit. She couldn't bring herself to jump, so she decided to sit there until she died of hypothermia. Patrick talks her into letting him help her hike back instead. Halfway down the mountain they're met by a rescue team called by Weird Nick.
- In Vino Veritas: When Patrick questions his drunk classmate Scott about some evidence that has gone missing, Scott angrily says that he didn't take anything. Patrick believes him because in his experience drunk people tell the truth, like when Sarah told him that she'd almost killed herself because of him.
- Ladykiller in Love: A female example. After Tracy begins her relationship with Mr Deal, she loses interest in casual sex and finds that sometimes she gets as much pleasure just from sharing small moments with him as she used to get from sex. Being with him makes her so happy that even work starts to seem almost rewarding.
- Let the Past Burn: Sarah tries to burn down the shed, which has been locked for the last ten years, in which she keeps the car she was driving when she killed her husband. But before the fire can really get going, Weird Nick, who lives next door, runs over and puts it out with the hose. When Patrick learns why she tried to burn down the shed, he burns it himself.
- Mercy Kill: Spicer sees himself as a hero who puts hopeless vegetables and their families out of their misery. The only murder he feels even slightly bad about is Sam Galen, who was slowly recovering when Spicer killed him to stop him from talking. He gives a Motive Rant about how people can live for decades with severe brain damage, unlike in films where you're either in or out of a coma.
- Miranda Rights: The police drag Patrick out of bed to arrest him over the severed head in his fridge (which he stole from the dissection room to examine it for evidence). One policeman starts reading his rights. Patrick interrupts him and recites the rest of the speech, which he knows from TV.
- Once for Yes, Twice for No:
- Sam is suffering from pneumonia and chest pain. A doctor tells him to blink twice if it hurts. He blinks many times.
- Meg is reading to Mrs Deal and wonders if her finger twitches might be an attempt to communicate. She tells her to tap her finger once for yes and twice for no. Mrs Deal taps eight times. Meg concludes that she doesn't understand anything after all. It turns out she's trying to communicate by tapping out letters.
- Put Off Their Food: While Patrick eats Christmas dinner with Sarah, he tells her all the gross details of dissecting cadavers, like the partially-digested food found in some stomachs. The conversation reminds her that the chicken on the table is another dead body and makes eating it seem disgusting. When Patrick describes the smell from a cadaver's bowels, Sarah slaps the table and yells, 'Oh for God's sake, Patrick! We're eating!'
- Resentful Guardian: Sarah dislikes Patrick and has told him multiple times that she wishes she'd never had him. When he gets so caught up investigating that he starts forgetting to call her, she's relieved.
- Rubik's Cube: International Genius Symbol: When Patrick meets Professor Madoc in his office, he finds him fiddling with a Rubik's Cube that he can't figure out how to solve. Patrick takes the cube, solves it in a few minutes, and offers to show Professor Madoc how to do it. Later, when he meets with Professor Madoc again, he sees that he's messed up the cube again. Even without picking it up, Patrick can see where he went wrong.
- Sexy Shirt Switch: Patrick's housemate Kim has a short kimono that her lovers wear after having sex with her.
- Sensory Overload: Patrick hasn't been to a party since he was five, when he had a meltdown and upset the cake table. In the present day, he goes to a party because a suspect he wants to talk to is there. In the time it takes him to walk across the living room to the relatively quiet kitchen, he becomes so overloaded that he wants to scream. Once he gets the information he wants, he flees the party as quickly as possible.
- Sleepy Depressive: After the death of Patrick's father, Sarah spent weeks doing almost nothing but sleeping. Patrick made himself sandwiches and got lifts to school with his Only Friend Weird Nick. Patrick and Sarah dislike each other, so he found her absence calming.
- Staircase Tumble: Mrs Deal is in a coma because of a brain hemorrhage caused by a fall down the stairs. She eventually manages to communicate that her husband pushed her. It's implied that Mr Deal kills Tracy this way when he catches her trying to get into the attic, which he's secretive about.
- Switching P.O.V.: Sam's chapters are in the first person and present tense. Other chapters are in the third person limited and past tense and follow a number of characters, mainly Patrick.
- Tears of Joy: Sam eventually recovers enough for nurses to spoon small amounts of orange juice into his mouth. It tastes so good that he cries. His joy is short-lived — Tracy carelessly feeds him too quickly and the juice goes down his airway, causing pneumonia.
- There Is Only One Bed: Lexi, the murder victim's seventeen-year-old daughter, tries to sleep on the couch in the house where Patrick is staying. A few hours later, he wakes up to find her climbing into bed with him, complaining that the couch is too short. Rather than share a bed with her, he climbs over her and spends the night in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. The next morning Patrick learns that after he left, Lexi crawled into Kim's bed and had sex with her.
- Throwing the Distraction: Patrick is snooping in the dissection room when someone else walks in and turns the lights out before Patrick can see who they are. Patrick is afraid whoever it is is the murderer, so he throws his trainer across the room and then leaves while the person is following the sound.
- Tragic Keepsake: Patrick takes care of his bicycle because it's the only thing he inherited from his father. Until Spicer hits him with his car, wrecking the bike.
- Weaponised Allergy: The killer drops a peanut into Sam Galen's mouth, causing his throat to swell shut. Patrick becomes suspicious when he finds the peanut lodged in the back of the cadaver's throat, even though the victim was on a feeding tube when he died.
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Sarah desperately wants Patrick to be normal and endlessly complains about his inability to connect with her and poor understanding of social norms, despite making little effort to connect with Patrick on his level or explain those social norms to him.
