The Night Season

In Chelsea Cain's latest thriller, "The Night Season," Homicide Detective Archie Sheridan is on the trail of a psychotic killer who uses a most unusual weapon to dispatch his victims. Sheridan has stopped popping pain pills and dutifully attends his psychotherapy sessions. However, he will never forget the torture and humiliation that Gretchen Lowell, known as "the Beauty Killer," inflicted on him. "His scars were as much a part of him as his eye color." This time around, Cain wisely puts Gretchen on the back burner; the "Beauty Killer" makes a brief appearance, but is not the story's central focus.


Archie has his hands full: The dead body of a woman is found on a carousel; skeletal remains that were missing for sixty years have suddenly surfaced; and a nine-year-old boy is missing. At Archie's side is Susan Ward, an aggressive, sassy, and extremely sharp reporter with an aptitude for digging up arcane facts. She writes a "quirky crime roundup column" and is always on the lookout for juicy material. She sports raspberry-colored hair and rainbow striped boots, smokes cigarettes, and wisecracks incessantly. Archie has a soft spot in his heart for the irrepressible Susan, so he gives her more leeway than he would to most reporters.
Meanwhile, a potential catastrophe threatens the city. Two weeks of heavy rains ("the kind of rain that got in your eyes and streamed down your cheeks") have pummeled Portland, Oregon, and the Willamette River is threatening to overflow. Cain maintains an excruciating level of suspense, nicely tying the menace of the rising waters to the search for a serial killer who enjoys watching people die. The scenes depicting the out-of-control flood waters washing away everything in their path are terrifyingly realistic.

Along with Archie, who is daring and heroic, the author showcases the ever lively and curious Susan (who in one scene is so uncharacteristically stupid that readers will want to shake her), the witty and astute medical examiner, Lorenzo Robbins, and Archie's friends and colleagues, Detectives Henry Sobol, Claire Masland, Jeff Heil, and FBI profiler Anne Boyd. Although the novel contains a few formulaic elements that do not quite ring true, they do not detract markedly from the book's entertainment value. "The Night Season" has sharp dialogue, an intriguing plot, a brisk prose style, and effective descriptive writing. This is a sure-fire page-turner and one of Chelsea Cain's most compelling works of fiction to date