I Am Not a Serial Killer

February 1, 2010
Fans of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series and its TV spinoff will welcome Wells's gripping debut, the first in a projected trilogy featuring 15-year-old sociopath John Wayne Cleaver. Cleaver lives in Clayton, a small town in the heart of Middle America, where he assists his mother with the family mortuary and seeks to keep his demons at bay through sessions with a psychotherapist and rigid adherence to a set of boundaries. Obsessed with serial killers, Cleaver lives in fear that the monster inside him will break out and act on his violent fantasies. When the eviscerated remains of a local man turn up behind a Laundromat, the first of several murders in which the killer butchers his prey and takes body parts as trophies, Cleaver turns detective. Wells does a good job entering the mind of his unlikely protagonist, but a surprising revelation about the Clayton killer's identity may turn off thriller readers who prefer not to mix genres.

May 31, 2010
The teenage (and innocent) John Wayne Cleaver swears he is not the serial killer that has emerged in his small town—despite his grisly name and a series of unpleasant and eerie similarities. His fascination with the killer leads him to launch his own investigation of sorts— one that leads him to the identity of the murderer. There are shades of Jeff Lindsay's darkly comic Dexter series, but John Allen Nelson is miscast. His female voices are grating caricatures, and he cannot become the protagonist—his voice is too deep, assured, and assertive even when the text suggests otherwise. A Tor hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 1).