Bolt the doors, bar the windows, and turn on all the lights before reading this latest thriller from Chelsea Cain: That scratching sound you hear outside might be Gretchen Lowell trying to break in!

Fans of the series know that Gretchen is—to oversimplify and shorthand it—kind of a female Hannibal Lector. No, she doesn’t eat her victims, but, Lord, does she devour their psyches—especially the ones who survive. Take Detective Archie Sheridan, whose psychosexual relationship with Gretchen has been the through-line for six books now. See, way back in book one, “Heartsick,” Archie was the lead detective trying to track down the Beauty Killer, a particularly loathsome fiend who did cruel and unusual things to his victims. Gretchen was a Portland psychologist who volunteered to help the squad track the elusive killer. Archie began an affair with her, only to discover that she was the very killer for whom they had been searching. After days of torture and other unspeakable experiments, Gretchen let Archie live and went to prison for her crimes. She has had a hold on him over the course of several books, both from within her cell, and from the outside after escaping.

In this outing, Gretchen is on the loose during Halloween season. Jack Reynolds’s drug enterprise has been infiltrated by his son, Leo, who is working undercover. Leo’s girlfriend, the irrepressible former reporter Susan Ward, is once again in the middle of things, and still pining secretly for Archie. Archie, meanwhile, continues his sexual trysts with his mysterious downstairs neighbor, Rachel.

After a private party on Reynolds’s island—a party which both Archie and Susan attend, unbeknownst to each other—several seemingly connected events occur: a murdered girl washes up on a nearby shore; Susan catches Leo in bloodstained clothing; Archie is rendered unconscious by Leo, only to wake up hours later on the island’s beach, much the worse for wear; and a disturbing security tape turns up which shows what happened to Archie for at least some of the time he was unconscious. Are these events all connected? And where does Gretchen Lowell fit in?

The author does a wondrous job of orchestrating the mayhem, pulling together disparate threads from this and past books. Her characters are the real deal: Flawed, feeling creations whose motivations may not be immediately apparent, but who always behave in believable ways. There are several payoffs in this book for which fans have been waiting, and new plotlines are begun.

Chelsea Cain is one of the most frightening writers in the genre. She writes prose that appears quite docile, but which jumps suddenly to sink its venomous fangs into your soul. This is creepy, often hellish stuff—as twisted as it is entertaining, and the stuff of nightmares.

LET ME GO is One of Chelsea Cain's Best, by Jackie K Cooper

Portland, Oregon Police Detective Archie Sheridan has a problem. There is a serial killer loose in his city. Her name is Gretchen Lowell and she and Archie have a long history together. He is fascinated by her and she loves him to death - at one time almost literally. This strange relationship makes up the core of Chelsea Cain's new novel LET ME GO, a complex and fascinating book.

If you have not read the first five Archie and Gretchen novels go ahead and plunge in now. You might not have all the details of their warped relationship but you will get the essence pretty quickly. Once you are into the story, hang on. It is one wild ride...

For full review, go to: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackie-k-cooper/let-me-go-is-one-of-chels_...

Despite being locked away in the Oregon State Hospital, serial killer Gretchen Lowell still looms large in Det. Archie Sheridan’s life in bestseller Cain’s utterly engrossing fifth thriller featuring the pair (after 2011’s The Night Season). When Gretchen claims that the Portland police detective’s two latest murder victims—one found flayed in a local park and another burned to a crisp atop the iconic city sign—are the work of killer Ryan Motley, Archie knows better than to take Gretchen at her word, but he’s intrigued when she mentions having a child, a new twist. Meanwhile, Susan Ward, now working as a freelance reporter, is following both the current murder case and the developing situation with Gretchen, going so far as to interview her at the state hospital, where Gretchen divulges tidbits of her early life, previously uncharted territory. That blood oozes off practically every page is never in doubt. But neither is Cain’s skill in creating riveting character drama between two damaged souls.150,000 first printing; author tour. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Aug.)

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.