Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Snow Cain was born February 5, 1972, in Iowa City, Iowa, and spent part of her early childhood on a hippie commune where her father had settled to evade the Vietnam draft. She earned a degree in political science from UC Irvine and a graduate journalism degree from the University of Iowa, then worked as a creative director at a Portland public relations firm and as a columnist for The Portland Mercury and The Oregonian before turning to fiction full-time.

Her debut thriller, Heartsick (2007), introduced Detective Archie Sheridan and the serial killer who once held him captive, Gretchen Lowell -- a novel that won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was named among Stephen King's best books of the year. Five more Sheridan/Lowell novels followed through Let Me Go (2013), after which Cain launched a second thriller series, Kick Lannigan, starting with One Kick (2014). She subsequently moved into comics, writing Marvel's Mockingbird (2016) and the creator-owned Image series Man-Eaters, before an earlier comic novel, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth (2005), rounds out her published fiction. Cain has lived in Southeast Portland, Oregon, since 2006, with her husband, film critic Marc Mohan, and their daughter.