Mostly, he solves the crime because he can intuit what the other killer is up to, though he has a hard time explaining how he knows these things without incriminating himself. It was much less interesting than learning more about how Dexter gets away with his crimes and how he thinks about the world.

The mystery itself is a bit humdrum, I think. You learn why his victims were chosen, but not what actually happens to them. The other thing that lets Lindsay get away with his choice of narrator is that you don’t read much about what Dexter actually does to people when he kills them. The story is told in a wickedly funny stream of Dexter-consciousness. Dexter is a very funny, if macabre, guy and a highly developed sense of snark. Second, he does care (as much as he can) about his family. First, he only kills people who have committed multiple murders and were never caught or punished for it. I mean, who in their right mind would root for this guy? There are a few things that redeem him.

It’s a fantastic challenge to use a narrator who is a serial killer that gets away with it. What I like about this book most is how Lindsay wrote it.

This book has been made into a television series, so I’m not going to much about with plot summaries (not that I do most of the time, anyway). Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a serial killer novel, but the twist is that the narrator is a serial killer, too. I think what eventually turned me off of this kind of mystery was that, after a while, I realized that I was pretty much reading the same book over and over again (except for Carr, who I re-read because his books are so fantastic). A few years ago, I had a thing for serial killer novels.

Darkly dreaming dexter book series