The Night Season

There haven't been quite as many books about violent female serial killers as there have been males, one reason Chelsea Cain's Portland-based series featuring the "Beauty Killer" Gretchen Lowell, has intrigued readers and reviewers alike. Of course, female serial killers do exist in real-life, e.g. Eileen Wuornos, Amelia Dyer, Belle Gunness, but the standard FBI profile is more likely to include a middle-aged white male psychopath.

Cain ups the ante in her series by creating a twisted and disturbing physical and emotional relationship between Gretchen and the detective she captured and tortured, Archie Sheridan, leaving him with a valentine-shaped scar she carved into his chest with an X-Acto knife and even worse psychological scars. The New York Times Book Review's Kathryn Harrison called the first book, Heartsick, a "dizzying novel. Lurid and suspenseful with well-drawn characters, plenty of grisly surprises and tart dialogue," and Stephen King placed both it and its follow-up, Sweetheart, on his ten best books of 2008 list.

Cain says her interest in serial killers all started with the Green River Killer. "He was our local serial murderer. They found his first victims in 1982. I was ten years old. He went on to kill dozens of women, mostly prostitutes, many of them teenagers. It was the first time that I was aware that there was that sort of danger in the world—That you could go out one day, and they might find you the next day, dead, naked in a river. His main killing ground was about an hour and half from the town I grew up in. But I still thought about him when I was walking my dog alone at night. I followed the stories in the newspaper and I knew that there was a task force assigned to catch him. I liked that idea—a team of professionals who were working really hard to keep me safe from the bogeyman."

In addition to Gretchen and Sheridan, the third character fleshing out the A-list cast in Cain's series is journalist Susan Ward, who takes over a primary narrative role in the latest installment, The Night Season. Sheridan is still part of the action, but Gretchen is present more in Sheridan's psyche than in person, locked away as she is behind bars. Night Season starts with a flashback to 1948 when the railroad town of Vanport, Oregon, is washed away when a dike breaks. After a skeleton is found 60 years later in present day Portland during new flooding of the Willamette River, Susan believes it may be related to the historic Vanport flood.

Detective Archie Sheridan is called in to investigate when a new body is found on a carousel in an amusement park, apparently drowned and then dragged from the river to the park. A brown puncture wound is discovered on the woman's palm, which leads to the realization that this drowning and two others are actually murders caused by a rare poison with an unusual delivery method. Soon, the recent murders, the Vanport skeleton and a young boy rescued from the raging river by Sheridan all become part of the same case. Sheridan and Susan work together to track down the culprit, all the while dancing around their growing  feelings for each other.

Cain says with this book she decided to write a page-turner…with less stabbing. "It's a little different than the others, but still loads of fun (maybe even more fun), and you get to see the characters doing stuff they don't usually do." However, she hastens to reassure fans of the first three books that the beautiful, complicated and twisted Gretchen will be returning to full force in book five, or as Gretchen herself says to Sheridan, "we're not done yet."