The Louisville Courier-Journal on LET ME GO

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.