November 2008 |
SFReader.com
Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first book in this series about Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter expert for the Miami Police Department and a serial killer, creates a unique, interesting character and world for us to live in as we read. In this second book, we find Dexter trying to fit into a normal life as conventionally as he can to squelch Sergeant Doakes suspicions about him. His relationship with Rita continues. He plays hide-and-seek with Rita's son and daughter and other kids in the neighborhood. After work, he goes to his Rita's house and drinks a beer or two, like he thinks most boringly normal men do after work. He kisses Rita dramatically at her door when he arrives and when he leaves. These things are for Sergeant Doakes' benefit, who has begun to relentlessly stake out Dexter when the novel opens. Though his reasons are nefarious, Dexter genuinely takes some pleasure in these activities with Rita and her kids. By the end of the book, Dexter's relationship with Rita develops inexplicably into an engagement. This "normal" life for Dexter is a direct result of the lessons he learned from Harry, his adoptive police officer father, and introduced in the first book. The heart of this second book, however, is not Dexter. In this sequel, Dexter is more witness than participant. While Sergeant Doakes investigates Dexter, another serial criminal appears in Miami. This perpetrator drugs his victims and, with a mirror on the ceiling so they can watch, surgically dismembers and disfigures them one piece at a time. He does not kill them, however. He keeps them alive as he does his work. He skillfully cuts off their fingers, arms, legs, genitals, eyelids, ears, and other body parts. He even cuts out their tongues. When his work is complete, all that is left is a featureless human torso and head which cannot walk, talk, or move in any meaningful way. Inevitably, Doakes and Dexter recognize something about each other. As in the first book, Dexter's Dark Passenger is able to recognize others with Dark Passengers, too. Somewhere behind Doakes' great anger lurks a chuckle from his own Dark Passenger. Not the same thing as Dexter's Dark Passenger, but a similar beast. The opportunity for Dexter to rid himself of Doakes' interest arrives in due course during the investigation of the new criminal in Miami. Doakes is wrapped up in the investigation as one member of a military team who served covertly in El Salvador together. Torture and murder were part of their protocol. When the team was pulled, they left one behind to answer for their activities. This man is the new serial criminal, torturing those who left him behind. One by one, the members of this team are captured, tortured and dismembered. Doakes is likewise captured and loses his tongue, hands and feet before he is rescued. This state of affairs, of course, frees Dexter from Doakes' grasp. After all, Doakes cannot tell anyone his suspicions about Dexter now. As in the first novel, Lindsay also leaves some highly suggestive undeveloped loose ends. Perhaps the most consequential undeveloped situation in this book is the knowledge that Cody, Rita's six-year-old son, has done something to the neighbor's dog while his older sister, Astor, watched. This apparently isn't the only episode, either. Cody is the boy and likes that sort of thing, Astor explains. Together, now, they share a small but horrible secret, and Dexter thinks that Cody has his own Dark Passenger, and that he can help Cody as Harry helped him. At Cody's confession, Dexter feels an echo from Harry rolling through his bones, when Harry told Dexter the exact same thing. Once more I have to ask, did Harry learn his code from experience and in turn teach them to an impressionable Dexter?
Read my full review of Dearly Devoted Dexter >(This review is also published at
epinions.com > )