#23: Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter in the Dark is the third book in the series about daytime police specialist and nighttime serial killer Dexter, a cheery Miami native and all-around nice guy whose "Dark Passenger" drives him to hunt the city's dark underbelly. Dexter's peppy narration is set in surprising contrast to plenty of gore and dark humor, coming off somewhere between Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.

In this outing, Dexter's "Dark Passenger" surprisingly flees at the outset in the face of the type of horrible crime he would typically enjoy. In an uneasy narrative device, Dexter relies on his girlfriend's young son, a budding serial killer in his own right, to help ferret out what's happened and teach the boy a moral code akin to the one Dexter was infused with (by a foster father who was also a cop).

The first two Dexter novels were tense police thrillers, strangely comedic while embracing a lizardlike cool, as the detached, clinical--yet oddly charming--Dexter dispatches those worse than him. But this time out the storytelling takes a confounding turn that, even as I kept reading, I was thinking "this isn't what I think it is."

But it was, as Lindsay takes a left turn into the supernatural, introducing demonic possession and other fantasy trappings that were absolutely absent from the first novels in trying to explain Dexter's "Dark Passenger," which had previously been attributed to childhood trauma (and, I suspect, that was plenty for any reader). It was as if Mickey Spillane suddenly had Mike Hammer fighting the Great Cthulhu, a sharp twist from Jonathan Kellerman to Dean Koontz without any notice of a fork in the road.

I have digested this one a bit and am still trying to guage the scale of this unfortunate misstep. I guess I will have to wait and see the next one to learn if Lindsay can right the ship. In googling and finding others who felt the same shock and surprise I learned that the popular TV series is veering away from the books in its next season, probably for the best.

I listened to this one on audio book on loan from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.