I DISAPPEARED THEM

by Preston L. Allen

Akashic Books
(www.akashicbooks.com)
2024, 296 pages, $27.95

ISBN 978-1-63614-161-9

Click Here to Purchase

Nothing is more challenging for an author than writing a book about the mental situation, capabilities, weaknesses, passions and angst of a serial killer. Allen carries it off almost with a sense of joie de vivre in I DISAPPEARED THEM.

The killer: Poe Edgar Jackson, a pizza delivery man and a father himself, who is known as the Periwinkle Killer (he leaves a corpse draped with those types of flowers). Is serial killing something that Poe inherited? His own father killed. Poe grew up experiencing a lot of bad things. Poe kills only those men who cheat on their wives. “The hunter” protects children, including his own, and even saves a young victim from a child serial killer.

The book teeters in time, from Poe’s teenage years and Andrea, his love and the mother of his children (but not his wife), and his obsession with “protecting” children from cheating spouses. He happens to kill Robert Montgomery, “The Snatcher,” who tortures and kills children.

The thrill of exacting vengeance is too powerful for Poe to overcome.

Allen does a remarkable job of accounting for the twists, turns and fate of the serial killers, who all seem to want to be found out and stopped. Will the authorities, including a newspaper reporter that Poe knows very well, stop the killer from causing further harm?