Skin Book

If you've ever wondered what happened to Scooby and the gang from Scooby Doo, Scooby got a couple of movie deals and the rest of them ended up in this overrated suspense novel. Someone in the town of Summerville, who goes by the name Red, is murdering innocent people. He wants to play psychological games with a small group of people, demanding that they kill the ugliest or everyone dies. Throughout much of the book, this group of five does little else other blame one another, justify why the other person is the ugliest and should die, or fall madly in love and then desperately out of love with one another. At times, it seemed Dekker wrote "Skin" while watching re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210.

For those readers familiar with Dekker and psychological thrillers, they'll figure out the ending half way through the book and then simply read frantically trying to get to the end so they can prove themselves right. Dekker seems to purposely telegraph the endings of his books, perhaps thinking he created a unsolvable puzzle. Sometimes, he uses innovative devices, but in Skin he used a pathetic cliche. And, of course, his sub par writing is only good enough to be in a book meant for the mass market. Dekker's books will never be required reading, or even suggested reading, in high school or college literature course.

After you read Skin by Ted Dekker, you will put it down, decide to never read another book by Ted Dekker, and conclude that the only thing that could have made it better is if the group of five had a dog named Scooby and the bad guy would have said at the end of the book, "And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for these meddling kids."