Chelsea Cain, Bellingham Girl, Best-selling Crime Novelist

Chelsea Cain, who grew up in Bellingham, now has had six (6) books, all of them crime novels, on the New York Times best seller list. The latest is Let Me Go, which Chelsea read from at the most recent Village Books Radio Show. It’s a continuation of the ongoing saga of Archie Sheridan, Portland detective, tough, kind, smart, and entranced by serial killer Gretchen Lowell, beautiful, sexy, brilliant, in her own twisted way in love with Archie, whom she damages profoundly. Chelsea published the first in the series, Heartsick, in 2007. It hit the best seller list immediately. Not for the faint of heart, Chelsea’s novels are built of detailed knowledge of police procedure and of medicine and human anatomy. Gretchen is the source of a chilling and detailed focus on the variety of ways that one human being can inflict pain on another. The basic structure of the series is that Archie not only pursues Gretchen the serial killer as a detective, but is drawn to her sexually. He arrests her, she escapes, he pursues her and arrests her. Occasionally she captures him and lovingly tortures him. The novels are tightly plotted, suspenseful, engrossing.

Chelsea moved to Bellingham at age 6 with her mother Mary Cain, who was the founder of A Lot of Flowers, that iconic flower shop at the corner of Harris Street and 11th Street in Fairhaven. Chelsea attended Lowell School, Fairhaven Middle School, and Sehome High School. Especially while attending Lowell and Fairhaven, after school Chelsea went almost daily to her mother’s store, then drifted to Village Books, settled into a corner and read. With a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine and a master’s degree from the U. of Iowa, she now lives in Portland with husband and daughter—and creates her Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell series.