Series of books tend to do best with consistency of tone. A series of romance novels wouldn't be best served by the sudden introduction of space travel in the third book, would it? And yet that is what Jeff Lindsay has done with Dexter in the Dark. The book plays at cheap mythology and Biblical themes as explanation for Dexter's sociopathy, an explanation that I as a reader would have been perfectly satisfied without. As a result, I simply couldn't bring myself to care about most of the main

This is probably the weakest of the Dexter series. Character development ranges from the nonexistent to the stereotypical: Rita continues her descent into a cardboard image of Woman with her obsession with her wedding (because all women are like that and all want the same frilly white excesss ending with a honeymoon in Paris, amirite?). Deborah, once almost an interesting character in her own right and tremendously interesting in the television series, now only curses, threatens to punch arms, and demands that Dexter do her work for her. Lindsay seems either unwilling or unable to create a strong, interesting female character, and most of the women he writes are either simpering fools or malicious schemers.

The technical construction of this mystery is marginally better than the others, though insufficiently compelling to make me care to solve it. It is paced better than the second, but the reader cannot even attempt to solve it along with Dexter and must instead sit in the back seat and watch as the characters do it.

(view spoiler)[One of the things that bugged me most, though, was the treatment of Dexter's loss of the Dark Passenger. Lindsay refuses to deal with the potentially positive side-effects of no longer being compelled by a Dark Passenger to kill people, and expects his reader to want Dexter's serial killing back as much as Dexter does. Most people though, not being serial killers, may feel more morally conflicted about wanting Dexter to have that back, but Lindsay is probably so wrapped up in his own character that he doesn't notice. When Dexter finally does have the Dark Passenger back, with just the slightest whiff of deus ex machina, I felt no emotional catharsis, because Lindsay had felt no need to persuade me that the return of Dexter's Dark Passenger really was the Right Thing to want. (hide spoiler)]

This book is good for the kind of reader who can't put down a series they start. It's not the best Dexter book, but it is still a Dexter book, and that makes it better than many other books available for cheap reading on the beach or during a commute. If you're one of those readers, treat it as a mindless guilty pleasure and you'll be fine. For those of you who are not so compelled, you don't lose terribly much by skipping the last three books, and this one in particular. Fans of the TV series may also be disappointed; for all its faults, this book is weaker than the TV series, particularly as it loses the most compelling aspect of its appeal: characterization. If you're reading this to have more Dexter stories beyond the television show, skip this and try to find some well-written fan-fiction instead. It may very well feed your Dexter fix better than this.