As an undercover policewoman, she is forced to dress in spikes, fishnets and spandex as she impersonates a streetwalker. Another plot element: Deborah has a job that she finds demeaning. Dexter says he isn't enough of a softy to love anyone, but at least he likes Deborah well enough to want to keep her alive.
In a mechanical but effective manner, ''Darkly Dreaming Dexter'' equips its filet-knife-wielding hero with the requisite motives and supporting characters. The book's psychological insights, which drive it toward a denouement rich in skin-deep Freudian responses to childhood, works along similar lines. And yet he has a job analyzing blood patterns. Lindsay will attract fewer readers with this stuff than he will with tableaus of dismemberment, and with one car chase that involves the strategic tossing of a severed head.Īs part of the rarefied tastes that are meant to make Dexter endearing, he likes to see mayhem conducted fastidiously. The me that was not-me, the thing that mocked and laughed and came calling with its hunger.'' It's a safe guess that Mr. ''Oh, the symphonic shriek of the thousand hiding voices, the cry of the Need inside, the entity, the silent watcher, the cold quiet thing, the one that laughs, the Moondancer. Lindsay makes it clear from the outset that Dexter answers to his own inner torments. With monstrously windy prose and Needless Capital Letters, Mr. Should this not be blunt enough, Dexter also invites his victim to ''meet your Unmaker.'' Then he confronts him with evidence of his crimes, as follows: ''You are mine now,'' declares Dexter, who might as well be twirling a malevolent mustache as he ambushes Father Donovan. This is established in a prologue featuring the torture of a pedophilic priest. Lindsay's reigning gimmick is that Dexter isn't so bad because he kills only his fellow killers. But Dexter shares some of Lecter's taste for chilly inhumanity, artistic violence and moral relativism. Hannibal Lecter from the top of the homicidal heap.
This much is clear: He's not clever enough to unseat Dr. Really, how witty is a killer who takes truncated body parts and arranges them to spell out ''Boo?''
In either case he is the spatter-pattern specialist Dexter Morgan, the narrator of Jeff Lindsay's fashionably grisly new novel, ''Darkly Dreaming Dexter.'' The book has attracted advance praise for its ghoulish ingenuity, but its degree of cleverness is questionable. Either that, or alliteration has an annoying new admirer.
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