Review: Dexter's Final Cut (Dexter book 7) by Jeff Lindsay
After giving a tepidly positive review to Double Dexter, we’re back to the depths of mediocrity again.
We start out fairly promising. After some plodding day-to-day in serial killing vigilante Dexter Morgan’s life, he gets quite the shake-up when his boss pulls him aside and gives him a special assignment: forensics consultant to a new cop show that’s being filmed in Miami. In order to do that, he’s going to get a shadow in the form of an obnoxiously overbearing and irritatingly handsome movie star Robert Chase, who plans to play a blood spatter analyst on TV and wants to see the real thing. But arriving with Robert is Jackie, a gorgeous actress who’s shadowing Dexter’s sister for her role as a detective on the same show. When Dexter becomes smitten with her, smitten enough to risk his comfortable life in Miami, and a serial killer starts targeting the women of the city in an especially gruesome fashion, he’ll be forced to decide what really matters to him.
Out of all the Dexter books so far, this one probably had the most potential. The premise of “they’re making a TV show and Dexter needs to consult” has lots of space for the kind of cynical humor that the series, at its best, indulges in, especially given Lindsay likely has personal experience with the topic (the series, as most people reading it likely know, has been adapted for the small screen, a move successful enough to spawn eight seasons and multiple spinoffs). Dexter has stuff he wants in this book, rather than just being pushed around by the plot, and without spoiling, I can say that the finale actually sees genuine risk and real changes in the status quo for our protagonist.
Unfortunately, most of this potential is squandered. The TV show subplot contributes to the progression of the story, but is never utilized to its fullest extent, being mostly an excuse for Dexter to fawn over Jackie and for Lindsay to toss in a few lazy jokes about celebrities being out-of-touch and off-putting. The murders, while quite gruesome for the series’ standards, are out of focus for most of the book and the majority of the status quo changes in this installment are awkwardly shoved into the last couple of chapters without much buildup.
I’ve mused in previous reviews for this series what, exactly, Lindsay intends for us to think of Dexter. At times it seems we’re supposed to see him as a tortured anti-hero, plagued by dark urges but ultimately managing to channel them into something productive and, when it comes down to it, attached to his family despite his protestations otherwise. At others, the narrative goes out of its way to show that he’s a selfish, shallow man who’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. In Final Cut, we’re firmly in the latter camp as Dexter contemplates throwing away his family for a woman he barely knows and misses obvious clues to the bad guy’s identity despite his supposed super-evil-senses.
The problem is that by leaning so far into this character device without backing it up with a lot of humor at the protagonist’s or society’s expense, the book mostly just leaves me annoyed. I was annoyed with Dexter’s selfishness, with Jackie’s weird interest in him despite barely knowing him (probably explainable as the enchantment of having a protector, but still), with everyone’s missing obvious signs until it’s too late, and most of all, with the absolute lack of anything to add interest or likability to most of the new characters. Jackie is the best of them, since she at least has “generically nice” to support her, but Robert Chase and the third star who shows up partway through the book are both so thoroughly off-putting that I was annoyed every time they were on screen.
The recurring characters aren’t much better. Lindsay has always relied on characters constantly repeating themselves, being vague, and stopping in the middle of sentences to convey a “realistic” feel to the dialogue, particularly when it comes to Dexter’s wife, but here, this trait is dialed up to teeth-grinding levels. The women in Dexter’s life, it seems, are mostly prattling morons who rarely have anything of use to say (and are ignored when they do). And while I’m certain now that this is at least partially an intentional attempt to portray our protagonist’s mindset, it was, like many other things, extremely annoying to read.
Topping off this stew of obnoxious elements is the fact that the entire premise of this installment is based on an out-of-character moment – Dexter has always shown very little interest in sex and relationships, so why is he suddenly drooling over a celebrity he barely knows? His step kids and daughter are among the very few people he genuinely cares for, so why is he so disinterested in them all of a sudden? This all could be made to work, but it just kind of happens, like Lindsay knows it’s necessary for the story to happen and just dismisses it with a wave of his hand.
So what I was left with was a boring, irritating story that fundamentally doesn’t fit with the established worldbuilding and saves all of the interesting character moments for the last 20 pages. I’m really glad that Dexter Is Dead is the last book because I’m not sure if I’d have the motivation to go any longer than that.
Warnings: For once, the serial-killer-of-the-book actually has some fairly gruesome crimes and the descriptions of knife wounds and sexual assault, while not exceptionally graphic, are fairly gnarly compared to the norm for the series. Dexter’s infidelity is one of the main plots of the book. Pedophilia comes up repeatedly as well, although the descriptions are not graphic, and as is usual, the finale places children in danger.
While it seems to be mostly in-character rather than author opinion, the portrayal of the female characters can come off as sexist and one of the side characters regularly uses racist and homophobic language.
