Sunday, March 27, 2011

BOOK: Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Hosted by Kerri at Mysteries in Paradise
By Friday of each week you have to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week.
Your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname.
So you see you have lots of choice.
You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow. 



This week we are up to the letter L, and L is for Lindsay, Jeff Lindsay. Lindsay is the author of the serial killer series Dexter. Dexter is also a television series on Showtime starring Michael C Hall.  Jeff Lindsay is the pen name of crime novelist Jeffry P. Freundlich (born July 14, 1952) Many of his earlier published works include his wife Hilary Hemingway as a co-author. His wife is the niece of Ernest Hemingway and an author in her own right. Lindsay was born in Miami and graduated from Ransom Everglades high school in 1970, and from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1975. (info from wikipedia)


Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, 368 pages

Global Reading Challenge: US

What to wear? I could think of no guidelines on what we were wearing this season to a party forced on you to celebrate an unwanted engagement that might turn into a violent confrontation with a vengeful maniac. Clearly brown shoes were out, but beyond that nothing really seemed de rigueur. p263

 It's a scary place inside Dexter's head, but quite funny. It's a dark humor obviously, as a psychopath/sociopath like Dexter can only achieve. He's not quite human, but he recognizes that in himself and he can usually spot a fellow psychopath. It helps him, see, because the only people that Dexter will kill are other serial killers. His dead foster father recognized his 'quality' and taught him how to survive and still feed the Dark Passenger, the name Dexter has for his killing persona.

This is the second in the series, and the serial killer is a  sick, sick killer. So much so that if you are queasy at all, I wouldn't recommend this book. It's such a dichotomy, with the humor and the grossness - I don't think this series is for everyone. I've read that the television series is a bit different, so I think I'm going to try and read the books before I investigate the show. I like the books, and I don't want that ruined yet.