The modern "I live on coffee, I chain smoke, I ponder my messed up personal life, and occasionally do a little murder solving, a murder that is extremely brutal and unnecessarily described in detail, because let's shock people a bit" thrillers/detective stories aren't my favorite thing in the world to spend my time with. Agatha Christies are addictive and Raymond Chandlers are perfect for an atmospheric evening, but a pile of Henning Mankells and Stieg Larssons have been abandoned within the first thirty or forty or so pages. I just can't deal with formulaic and flat plots, characters that dissolve into grey goop, and clumsy writing.

I do try to rehabilitate myself from my attitude (because I really like detective stories, so there has to be something from the 1990s-2000s that I like) with books that have an unusual twist or at least something that smells like non-ordinary. Chelsea Cain's Heartsick did manage to light a small spark, but in the end it didn't turn out to be as great as I thought, so I didn't bother writing anything about it. In principal, the idea was great, because female serial killers are rare both in real life and maybe in literature, too.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter was chosen as the next victim, because I used to watch the TV show. Lindsay's interpretation of a detective story/thriller is interesting and fresh, though, so I probably would have read this at some point anyway.



In some ways, our boy Dexter is a pretty regular psychopath: blends in the crowd, calm and collected, unable to feel empathy/pity/regret, and is a skillful manipulator. The only difference is that Dexter's foster father encouraged him to only kill criminals. No one knows, not colleagues nor his foster sister Deborah, that Miami police department is paying a serial killer's salary, a serial killer who loves cleanliness and order but is repelled by blood. Then another serial killer arrives in the city and wants Dexter's attention.

Although Miami isn't described that much, so the location could be any city in the country (my pet peeve in thrillers and detective stories, by the way), I was constantly thinking about the TV show while reading. My brain filled all the gaps, and I saw very clearly images of Dexter's department, hot and sunny streets, Hawaii shirts, and rustling palm trees in the tropical night.

I ran into trouble only when some of the characters were described as being different than what I'd grown used to. The book Dexter seems to be have more of a Patrick Bateman type of charm that draws women to him, Deb a curvacious bomb shell, and LaGuerta an unprofessional idiot. Basically, the only female characters are either bland (Rita), obnoxious (LaGuerta), or otherwise annoying (Deb).

However, despite its few shortcomings, Darkly Dreaming Dexter is still better written and more addictive than others of its kind, and its not unnecessarily padded with extra stuff. I also heard something about the book series taking a different turn right at the end than the TV show did, which would be perfect (the first installment already had a couple of differences in the plot, so I'm looking forward to where Lindsay is taking me next). I haven't yet grown attached to Dexter, but hopefully it'll happen in the future. After all, Michael C. Hall's performance was so good, that you almost didn't want Dexter to get caught. The battle of good and evil and all the grey morals in both the protagonist and the viewer were the best parts of the show.