Dexter

About the Dexter series

Dexter Morgan is a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami-Dade Police Department — cheerful colleague, doting boyfriend, devoted brother. He is also a serial killer. Orphaned in traumatic circumstances and adopted by policeman Harry Morgan, who recognized what the boy would become, Dexter was raised on the "Code of Harry": if the Dark Passenger inside him must kill, it will kill only those who deserve it — the murderers, predators and monsters the justice system misses. Jeff Lindsay's novels are narrated by Dexter himself in one of crime fiction's great comic voices: alliterative, vain, coolly puzzled by human emotion, and very funny about the logistics of being a monster with a day job.

Across eight books, Lindsay tests the Code from every angle. Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004) pits him against the Ice-Truck Killer, an artist in blood whose work Dexter can't help admiring; later books push into stranger territory than the TV series ever did — a supernatural rival predator in Dexter in the Dark, cannibals in Dexter Is Delicious, a Hollywood production shadowing Miami Metro in Dexter's Final Cut — while Dexter marries Rita, helps raise three children (two of them showing his own dark symptoms), and spars with his suspicious foster sister Deborah. The saga closes definitively with Dexter Is Dead (2015). The first novel inspired Showtime's Dexter, but the books chart their own darker, weirder, wittier course.