I am thoroughly fed up with psycho serial killers as a plot device.

[scarletwoman]

I've been quite addicted to Police Procedurals/Murder Mysteries/Crime Novels for a number of years, and I've devoured hundreds of books in those genres. However, I've lately realized that I no longer have any patience with the "psycho serial killer" trope - even though many of my favorite authors over the past few years have utilized it.

It's just gotten to be too much. I've come to think of it as a thorougly dishonest cop-out - they might as well be ascribing crimes to aliens from outer space, for all the intellectual honesty that's involved. An author can construct a psycho serial killer to commit any sort of heinous crime they can imagine, and we're just supposed to buy that the world of crime is inhabited by a plethora of sadistic nutcases against whom their hero must do battle. Bah! It's cheap, it's lazy, it's an insult to the reader's intelligence.

Give me a single murder (or two) committed by an ordinary human, that gets solved step-by-step by the protaganist delving into ordinary lives in ordinary communities of ordinary human beings. Nothing showy, nothing gory, just an exploration of the non-psycho human condition that led to some ordinary human being to commit a murder.

From now on I mean to stay away from any book that relies on a psycho serial killer for a plot device.

YMMV.