So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer

Here is the purported prison diary of an English serial killer named Graham Underwood, a didactic sociopath from the government housing office who was threatened once too often by the agency's ""clients.'' One by one, he scouts out suitably underclass targets for ""moral'' culling. But Dalrymple has deeper matters than violent sensationalism on his roster. The bulk of the novel is given over to Graham's philosophic meanderings and rationalizations of his crimes. Graham is a gasbag who repeatedly poses rhetorical questions that betray his overblown sense of his own intelligence: ""Have I not so far proved many things to you which you would not previously have believed?"" No, he has not. His arguments are mostly misdirections about the hypocrisy of British culture or sheer tautological hooey. First-novelist Dalrymple (If Symptoms Persist), a physician whose practice includes a prison in an English inner city, chills the blood with this compelling narrative: the rational-sounding, deeply pernicious thoughts of a madman. (July)