Inky Depths

By ZOË SLUTZKY

By now, Archie (and Cain’s loyal readers, of which there are many) knows the signs of a serial killer all too well. In “Heartsick” and its two sequels, Cain conjured Gretchen Lowell, a blue-eyed psychopath with an endless résumé of gory murders. Archie was Gretchen’s special victim, trapped and tortured after 10 years on her trail, and spared at the 11th hour in a twisted act of mercy. Back in jail, Gretchen has receded to the fringes of the narrative, but her lethal beauty haunts the detective. He fingers the heart-shaped scar she carved into his chest as if it has replaced his own.

The crimes in “The Night Season” are at once less plausible and less deliciously perverse than Gretchen’s drawn-out butcheries. As the hours creep by, the task force discovers the killer’s bizarre, ­aquarium-bound weapon. The motive is murkier. Susan Ward, The Oregon Herald’s neon-haired crime columnist, returns in a central role, shadowing Archie as he makes his sleepless way through the investigation. Despite his half-hearted attempts to shake her off, her dogged detective work proves crucial to the case. “You know how everyone has a tiny talent?” she asks him. “Like parallel parking? Or catching serial killers? Mine is Googling.” Irreverent, vulnerable and sharp, she is as shrewdly drawn as Archie and as interesting to watch. As in the past, she ends up in the thick of things, and the book’s high-octane ending hinges on her resolve.

Cain intercuts her quick-paced chapters, which spin each narrative strand with expert restraint, with brief moments in the murderer’s footsteps. In one early scene, Susan scours the park at night while the killer follows two paces behind, obscured by the darkness beyond her flashlight’s beam. “He could kill her. In a heartbeat,” he thinks. “He would not even break a sweat doing it.” These glimpses of psychosis are unsettling, but they never chill with the force of Gretchen’s ice-blue stare. Like Gretchen, this novel’s cephalopod-obsessed killer wants his victims to experience death — to know it intimately. But there is a motive to his derangement. Perhaps inevitably, Gretchen’s deadly machinations are more frightening for their wanton brand of evil.

Still, the world that Cain creates is as dark and ominous as ever. The novel’s greatest menace is the weather, which transforms Portland’s familiar topography into something less than welcoming. Flooded and obscured by rain, the city becomes wild, unknowable: “The thin wisps of trees lining the sidewalk shuddered, bare-leaved, in the wind. The whole world glistened wet and black, like the Pacific Ocean at night.” When the storm nearly levels its downtown, the sudden shifts in perspective are vertiginous, and thrilling. This is the mood that Cain has mastered: the dread of knowing something is off, but not being able to see it clearly. It is what presses her readers onward, pulses rising along with the waterline.

Finally free, at least physically, of his former lover and crazed torturer, Gretchen Lowell, who's behind bars, Portland Detective Archie Sheridan vies with a slightly more mundane serial killer in Cain's latest installment in the series (Heartsick, 2007, etc.).

Where do you go as a mystery writer after your beautiful, smart, cruelly amusing main attraction has pulled out all psychotic stops in making your star detective's life an unrelieved hell? In this volume, Cain gives Gretchen a breather and replaces her with a largely unseen male menace. Accompanied by a nine-year-old boy who was stolen from his parents 18 months ago, this serial killer carries around small, blue-ringed octopuses in baggies, subjects his victims to their poisonous bites and tosses the corpses in the river. The killings begin after the discovery of a skeleton points back to the Vanport flood of 1948, which wiped out an entire public-housing project and claimed the lives of many residents who were tardily warned by authorities of the impending disaster. Sixty-two years later, with the overflowing Willamette River about to wreak havoc on Portland, two people close to the still-shaky Sheridan are touched by the octopus killer's evil: Henry Sobol, a fellow cop, and Susan Ward, a hungry crime columnist with wild hair. Compared to the Gretchen Lowell books, there's nothing else particularly wild about this novel. But the story is deftly handled, the suspense is plentiful and Cain's evocation of the gloomy atmosphere and Portland setting is superb. Gretchen fans will be pleased when she shows up at the end and with a glance tells us we haven't seen the last of her, but this novel does an excellent job of killing time until then.

A strong and satisfying, if less extreme, outing from the new queen of serial-killer fiction.

Portland, OR, is shutting down owing to torrential rains and rising floodwaters, but Det. Archie Sheridan can’t come in because the dead body count is rising quickly, too. Conventional wisdom says these are drowning victims, but when colleague Henry Sobol is felled by a toxin, we realize a serial killer has devised yet another exotic means of death. Intrepid journalist Susan Ward thinks the victims are tied to the historic floods of 1948, and when the clues fall into place, Archie realizes she’s right again. Fighting the weather and a crafty killer means they have to win this one the hard way—by swimming. The team continues to be haunted by their nemesis Gretchen Lowell, the so-called Beauty Killer, but her influence is minimal in Cain’s fourth Archie Sheridan novel (Heartsick; Sweetheart; Evil at Heart), and this brings a certain freshness to the story line. VERDICT Perfect for readers who want to mix true crime history with their contemporary serial killers, as in Lisa Black’s Trail of Blood or Michael Harvey’s The Third Rail. The pace is as relentless as the floodwaters engulfing Portland. Buy heavily and enjoy recommending this to new Cain fans. [150,000-copy first printing; library marketing.]—Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib., Fairfield, CA

Cain is among a new breed of women writers stepping way out of the stereotypical female comfort zones of writing purple prose and chick lit, and instead serving up meatier and more gruesome stories.