We first meet Dexter Morgan under a full moon in Miami. He’s stalking a priest. Father Donovan is a cuddly man who works with children in an orphanage. Tonight the priest chats with a nun, kisses and hugs one of the orphan girls, says goodnight to various employees as he crosses the parking lot, and then gets into his car.

Dexter sits up in the back seat and snaps a fishing-line around Father Donovan’s neck. One twist brings the oxygen-deprived priest under his control. He forces Donovan to drive to a miserable shack far out in the countryside. Terrified, the priest recognizes the place. Dexter drags Father Donovan inside and makes him look at the bodies of several children that Dexter has exhumed from the garden.

The priest starts sniveling that he didn’t mean to kill the children and bury their bodies. He just couldn’t help himself! He whines a question: is Dexter a cop, or what? Well, hardly. Dexter tells the priest that he can’t help himself either. But he would never kill children. Instead, he likes to kill people who really deserve it. Then he happily gets to work on Father Donovan.

Believe it or not, this shockingly original novel is (mostly) written as a comedy! It has some intense moments. But the author wisely keeps the violence implied instead of wallowing in gore. Dexter, the world’s most polite serial-killer, provides an appealing first-person narrative. He’s smart, witty, good-natured, fastidiously neat, and somewhat baffled at the behavior of humanity of which he does not consider himself a member.

His inability to see himself as human gives the comedy a poignant undertone. Apparently, when he was three years old, he witnessed something horrible happen to his real family – something he can no longer remember. But it left him with both a keen desire to butcher people, and a contradictory dislike for blood. Now he makes his living – no kidding – as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami cops.

Dexter’s foster father Harry, a cop, recognizes young Dexter as a predator long ago. In flashback, Harry, who has taken the boy on a camping trip, gingerly brings up the subject of murder. Young Dexter is attracted to the idea. Harry wants to know why he hasn’t done it yet. The kid nervously admits that he thought his foster parents might be … um, mad at him? Disappointed?

Obviously the kid is a sociopath with no capacity for empathy, but he’s not totally beyond redemption. At least he still cares about his foster parents’ opinion! Harry opens young Dexter’s eyes to the realization that there are plenty of criminals in the world who truly deserve to die. He makes the boy promise to only practice his hobby on the deserving. Then he teaches him how to hide his tracks from the cops.

Now Dexter is grown up, and having a great time with his hobby. He’s doing his best to fake being human. His foster parents are dead (of natural causes), but he still has his foster sister Deborah, a cop with the Miami PD, of whom he is mildly fond – the strongest emotion he feels for anyone. (Deborah doesn’t know about his hobby.) He has no interest in sex, and is somewhat befuddled by the various women who express interest in him. But, hey, he’s just butchered a priest, and life is good!

Then, a different serial killer strikes! The Miami police find a murdered prostitute who has been carved into an elaborate pile of body parts that Dexter can’t help admiring. Deborah hopes that the case will lift her out of the backwater of Vice, and into the more interesting Homicide department. Dexter dutifully tries to help her: she is his sister. Plus, she’s so blunt and ignorant of office politics that she needs his subtle guidance. But soon he starts to wonder if he isn’t somehow sleepwalking and doing the crimes himself! The clues are starting to point to a killer who looks like him …

It sounds gruesome, but the novel (book 1 in a new series) is a wickedly fun read. It won a Dilys Award (given to the novel that independent mystery booksellers most enjoyed selling in a given year), and is the basis of a television series on the cable channel Showtime. You can find Darkly Dreaming Dexter on Amazon through this link: Darkly Dreaming Dexter