One of the joys in reviewing the new season of Showtime's Dexter has been in the preparation. I did just re-watched the previous season. I watched all the other seasons, read every interview I could find and even dove into a couple of reviews, both good and bad. I even got an advanced copy of the Dexter video game for the iPhone.

But while watching that iconic opening of Dexter's mourning routine, I noticed the credit to Jeff Lindsay, the author of the first Dexter novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter on which the whole show is based. I picked it up in the library and even though I knew most of what happened from the show's first season, it was still a very enjoyable read. It was dark, funny, foreboding and every other adjective you would expect to hear from a review of a great mystery novel.

The best part is that even if you watch the show, you can still enjoy the books since they take very different paths that still provide plenty of good twists and turns. Any Dexter fan would enjoy them.

The Premise: Michael C. Hall (of Six Feet Under fame) plays Dexter Morgan, a forensic investigator and blood-spatter analyst for the Miami-Dade Police Department. But that's only his day job. Beneath his chipper attitude is a dark secret, one that harbors his disgust for those who do wrong. When he isn't investigating a murder for the boys in blue, Dexter takes matters into his own hands. An efficient killer, he hunts down and brutally murders the horrible people (child molesters, rapists, other serial killers) that actually deserve to die. When he isn't chopping up his latest victim, Dex deals with the rest of his mundane life: mentoring a sister who's also a cop, fending off sexual advances from his boss, and trying to figure out a girlfriend who he doesn't really want to sleep with.