The Traveller (Paperback)

"The Traveller" is the story of a man's descent in to madness, as he deliberately starts on a campaign of murder to satiate his sociopathic tendencies. Told in the first person by the protagonist, the story follows the eponymous "Traveller" (his name is never revealed) as he embarks on his dark journey. We learn that he is very much a creation of his age and environment, an otherwise well-educated and high-functioning individual who decides, with no real reason, that he has a desire to kill, and as he has never been denied anything before in his cossetted life, feels likewise that there is no reason why he cannot fulfil this desire as well. He has sampled other pleasures before - drugs, sex, alcohol - but each rush is never enough for him, and he believes that only through the act of murder can he feel truly fulfilled. Knowing that a murder, no matter how randomly committed, could easily be traced back to him, he decides to employ his wealth and intellect to commit the murders as far away from his home-base as possible, travelling overseas to enact them on randomly selected victims. His thinking is that as each police department works in a very myopic, localised manner, no one will be able to discern a pattern in the murders if committed far enough apart from each jurisdiction. He meticulously plans his actions, from changing appearance and manners, to trying to blend in as much with the crowd, to travelling under assumed identities, so as not to leave behind any discernible trail. He even attempts to remove all trace of his existence, to "go off the grid." However, his narcissistic plans do not go exactly as planned.