For Jasper Francis Dent, every day is Take Your Child to Work Day. His father, Billy Dent, teaches him the jargon, the tools and the skills to one day take up the family profession: serial killing.
Thankfully, those days are over. Billy Dent is in prison for multiple life sentences, Jazz has a loyal best friend and a talented girlfriend, and he’s living a decent facsimile of a normal teenage life. But when bodies start dropping around the insular town of Lobo’s Nod, Jazz not only knows it’s a serial killer, he also knows that it’s a serial killer imitating the one and only Billy Dent. Jazz has to stop the killer, to undo his father’s legacy and save lives, and also to prove his innocence to a suspicious town. But there’s a problem: to catch a killer, Jazz has to think like a killer, and once he opens that doorway inside himself, who knows what he might find?
Barry Lyga’s no stranger to off-beat YA fiction and that mastery is evident in I Hunt Killers. Yes, there’s splatter, yes, there’s suspense, but the true horror is not in the blood and guts, but in the inner workings of Jazz’s mind. His struggle is to humanize others and himself (“People matter,” he reminds himself over and over again,) and to avoid the sociopathic tendencies drilled into him by his father. Even though he grapples with the darkness in his own mind and genuinely wants to be a good person, he still slips into “Billy mode”; he manipulates the people he cares about, he fantasizes about murdering his own grandmother, he’s able to think in chillingly pragmatic terms (like how much blood cutting off a finger would produce.) In short, Jazz’s morality is a constant choice and sometimes a disturbingly difficult one, but maybe that’s something every reader can relate to, on a smaller, less bloody scale. This book is great for fans of mystery, both adult and young adult, and fans of shows like Dexter, Psych and The Mentalist, but warning: it’s not for the weak of stomach.