THE APPEAL OF THE DEPRAVED

A former soldier tracks a psychotic serial killer in this crime drama.

Alexei Lupescu was born in Romania and abandoned at an orphanage. He was adopted by an American family and taken to Charlotte, North Carolina, to start a new life. Soon Alexei shows signs of both intellectual precociousness and psychological abnormality—he has a genius level IQ but a chilling lack of empathy for others. Dr. Hargrave, a renowned psychiatrist, examines 8-year-old Alexei and predicts he will eventually become a sexual predator as well as a serial killer—a peculiarly specific prognostication issued with self-confidence. At 10, the boy runs away from home to live on the “ragged edge of society.” By 16, he’s a major figure in the Charlotte underworld. As Hargrave foretold, he does transform into an unrepentant murderer, but he’s nearly impossible to catch. He comes to be known as “The Chameleon Killer,” an unimaginative moniker typical of the novel’s sterile prose that ranges from the blandly declarative to the melodramatic. Maj. Clive Cooper, a former elite solider now working for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, nicknamed by his peers the “Hunter Killer,” is tasked with tracking Alexei. There is no shortage of stories about serial killers and their pursuers in literature and popular culture in general, and Howard contributes nothing new or fresh to the genre. Furthermore, the story is needlessly implausible as well—Alexei’s “psychopathy was expanding and allowed him, by an unknown cerebral mechanism, to process everyday experiences at an accelerated rate.” This short novel is little more than the tedious regurgitation of shopworn fictional formulas. Still, the plot is briskly paced, and there is plenty of dramatic action.

An all-too-familiar plot and banal writing.