Mass Murderers & Teen Sleuths

It was a slow reading week for me but would have been slower if it hadn’t been for the car service fiasco. Work has been a little busy, moderators on vacation and such, and blogging has been even busier.

I skipped over a large stack of books that TW has already read in favor of Dearly Devoted Dexter. I was more excited about the release of the second Dexter than I was about Harry Potter and it did not let me down.

We discovered Darkly Dreaming Dexter last year, right before we headed to Miami for a cruise. It was amusing to drive down along the docks of Miami and see all of those metal storage containers that played such a large role in Darkly Dreaming.

Dexter is a bad bad guy. He’s not even really human. But he looks human and most people find him pretty charming. Women seem to fall at his feet and he’s not sure what to do about that. What he’d rather do is let his “dark passenger” take over and just KILL. But, he doesn’t…unless a really really BAD person comes along. Preferably one who is not nice to children, that’s Dexter’s preferred victim.

The Dexter books manage to be funny and gruesome at the same time, but not in the way a Christopher Moore slasher novel would be. It’s hard to explain, you just have to read it for yourself and find out.


After Dexter, I grabbed the next book from the library stack with a quickly approaching return date and that just happened to be Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. What a switch from Dexter to a grown up Nancy Drew! Ha!

I was a huge Nancy Drew fan as a kid. I’d use my allowance every weekend to buy a new Nancy Drew book and finish it within a couple of hours. Then I’d beg my mom or dad to take me to Sam Solomon’s (which was closer than the bookstore and a place my parents seem to like pretty well so it seemed like a good shot…) and get them to buy me another one – because I was bored and I neeeeeeded to read another and another and another. I didn’t read them all, I got sidetracked by adult novels or something – I’m blaming The Female Eunuch because I know I read that around the same time as I was reading the last of my Nancy Drews. Germaine Greer, DAMN YOU!

OK back to this little “parody”, it was ok. Not great. I like the gay girl version better but it had it’s amusing moments. Nancy and Frank Hardy and their love child that grew up thinking he was Ned’s child. Ha! Very amusing, indeed.

I’m about to pick up a book by another of my favorite authors but I’ll tell you about that in a couple of days…

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