The Digested Read: DEXTER IS DELICIOUS by Jeff Lindsay

Being the continuing stooooooory of a quack who has gone to the - no, hold on, that’s the Muppet Show. Herewith be the latest in an increasingly improbable line of Digested Reads, aka the Novel du Jour in 300 words. Roll it there, Collette …

“Hi, I’m darkly disturbed Dexter. Deeply, dizzily deranged, in fact.
  “My schtick is that I murder scumbags with alliteration overkill - but hey, you try living in Miami without cutting loose once in a while.
  “That’s a psychopath joke, by the way. ‘Cutting loose’. Because I’m not just a deliciously diseased destroyer of depraved desperadoes, I’m a hoot and a half too. Deliriously delightful.
  “Anyhoo, that’s all in the past now. Yep, no more migraine-inducing alliteration for moi. I’ve had a baby, y’see, and she’s lovely. Luminously, lushly, ludicrously lovely. I mean, those psycho kids my wife Rita had before we met want to play with her all the time.
  “Gosh, I feel almost human. Hey, maybe all that morbid mutilating malarkey is a teensy-weensy bit immoral, eh?
  “Woah, stall the ball! There’s cannibals loose in Miami! And if there’s one thing that’s going to stop an invasion of cannibals, it’s an alliterating psychopath like devotedly dedicated defender Dexter.
  “Get the knives, kids - it’s play-time.
  “Did I mention that I’m a blood spatter forensic scientist attached to the Miami Police Department, even though I can’t stand the sight of blood? Irony, that is. Pay attention at the back, or I’ll kill you.
  “No, I’m only kidding. A jocular jester of joking japestery, c’est moi.
  “By the way, did I mention that my psycho-freak brother has turned up, and that he’s even more disgustingly dedicated to deviously depopulating than I am?
  “Rita’s freaky kids seem to like him, though.
  “What’s that? The cannibals? Right, yes. They want to eat me, apparently.
  “Take that, cannibal-types! Boosh! Ka-blooey!!
  “Incidentally, has anyone here read that Hannibal Lecter book about the charming psychopath? No? Thank God for that.
  “Bam! Biff!!
  “Feeling peckish, cannibal-types? Well, here’s a side order of Dexter’s divinely dispensed disingenuous DESTRUCTION!
  “De End.”

  THE DIGESTED READ, IN A LINE: I scream, you scream, we all scream for Miami Vice cream.

  This article first appeared in the Evening Herald.