By Sondra London (2022)

FREE SPEECH. Our culture has always valued and protected free speech, but now the new normal calls for warnings on anything that might offend anyone. Sicarius was written by a serial killer on Death Row. It is too disturbing for anyone but emotionally mature adults.

If you are too young to vote, to own a gun or to drink; if you are naive, tender-hearted or prone to taking offense; or if the very idea of a serial killer telling a story makes you want to hurt somebody, please do not read this book.

Political correctness is superseded in these pages by the need to process serious trauma and hardcore reality that affects us all, intimately or indirectly. Unexpurgated tales of vicious assaults, dialog with demeaning language, even just crude disrespect are bound to hurt your feelings sooner or later. Best to just stop now.

TRANSGRESSIVE. Criminal behavior is transgressive, for it involves violating the boundaries of the social contract. Transgressive fiction dramatizes forbidden behavior.

Though chained and bound, the felonious author is free to express himself without fear of censorship here, so he pulls no punches in taking us into a world seething with criminal dreams and schemes. The novel can be skimmed superficially as light entertainment, yet you will find depths to mine for insights into the roots of crime.

DEATH ROW FICTION. My first book was subtitled Tales from Death Row. Next came Killer Fiction, with a serial killer's "actual fantasies" and "false confessions." In my five years with Danny Rolling, we went from true crime confessions to songs, poems, artwork and novels.

The authenticity of its provenance is valuable because it demonstrates mens rea - the guilty mind that incubates the most heinous crimes. Rolling's extreme violence proceeded from the same toxic thought syndromes displayed here. Readers are hereby schooled: thinking like this is what got the author executed. So, Dear Reader, appreciate this book as "good men dream what bad men do," but do not try to be a Sicarius.

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK & KINDLE