Love Gone Mad by Mark Rubinstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A deadly fiction based on psychiatric disorder of a man who loved his wife very much.

Storyline: Conrad Wilson, a sexually abused child by his adopted father, grows up to be physically strong but with a psychiatric ailment called paranoid delusional disorder. He believes that his beloved beautiful wife Megan Haggarthy cheated upon him by bearing a girl child which doesn’t belong to him, but of a person called Dr.Adrian Douglas, a cardio surgeon. The reason behind which he ventures to kill both of them. Megan takes a divorce from Conrad and lives with her daughter separately, under police protection.
Dr Adrian, a divorced man, who is desperate to live a life with a beautiful small family of his own, gets attacked by Conrad even before he ever met Megan. Adrian meets Megan once accidentally, after the attack, and they immediately fall in love. Conrad makes multiple attempts to murder the lovers and ends up in jail followed by a court trial wherein his lawyers prove that Conrad was suffering from insanity and a psychiatric disorder due to his abused childhood. The twist in the story and the reality comes in when Adrian and Megan discover that the child of Megan does really belong to Adrian, when Megan conceives with artificial insemination of the sperm from Adrian at the sperm bank. This is unknown to both of them. This secret is found out by Conrad due to his extra-ordinary animal trait of being able to smell the genetic odour of the child matching with that of Adrian, even before the donor and the recipient knew about it. This as explained by the experts is due to the extra large olfactory node present in Conrad like in animals that can smell the scent of their offspring. This secret is held by Megan as she couldn’t conceive through Conrad and wanted to keep the marriage intact.
Conrad is sent to a rehabilitation centre from where he again escapes cleverly by pretending good behaviour with the authorities, only to attack the married Adrian-Megan couple, once again, to take revenge for being cheated by Megan, whom he loved very much and wanted the same in return. The couple is saved by the police in the nick of time and Conrad gets killed in the tussle.
The original secret gets cremated forever between Adrian and Megan while the police and court thinks that Conrad suffered from a psychiatric disorder.

Positives: A very interesting page turner right from the beginning. A scintillating thriller. The medical link to legal trials and the outcome involving a set of doctors and lawyers trying to show their each other’s superiority in the court is commendable. The psychiatric disorder of Conrad and the way it is used to save Conrad from being convicted by his lawyer is worth reading. Overall, the scientific reasons behind Conrad’s behaviour and his animal traits in being able to identify his offspring through his ability to smell is hair raising. A perfect blend of love, law and science makes the book highly thrilling.

Negatives: The dis-integrating human values in the society is a matter of concern once again. The absurd behaviour of irresponsible parents towards their children which lead to the making of such psychos in the society challenging the security of the good ones. This book might give the readers the fear of such impending danger.



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