Tanya Starling, a blond, aka, Rachel Sturbridge, a brunette, aka short-haired Nancy Mills is a calculating woman. She's enough of a babe to attract a man when the need arises and deadly enough to create the need when she's had enough of one and murder is the quick way to erase memories and ties. Which is why, as a transient resident of Portland Oregon, she shoots businessman Dennis Poole in the head while he's taking a bath. "Dennis had been a satisfying experience. But Dennis was over," she later thinks to herself while going over her decision to pull the trigger. Now, on the road again, she's already planning where and when to meet her next boyfriend/victim and what alias she'd like to use.

Two important repercussions result from the discovery of Dennis Poole's body. First, Portland Police Detective Catherine Hobbes, a determined woman with a keen and constant sensitivity about her representation of the female gender in law enforcement, catches the case. Second, the dead man's cousin, Hugo, a well known mob boss, hires P.I./retired copy Joe Pitt to find his cousin's killer.

Hobbes, daughter of a renowned and retired homicide detective, quickly does away with the first theory that's put forward, that it's a case of suicide. Her investigation has to focus on who had a grudge against the dead man. But when the forensic team finds the murder scene vacuumed and cleaned, discovering only a few blond hairs, she wonders, could it have been over a woman? "I've got to find that girl," she declares.

The lady detective, who happens also to be a babe, is less than pleased to have Pitt involved, but she tolerates the team-up despite the arousal of her most sensitive anxieties about gender inequality within the force. She's wary of everything about Pitt, including his reputed womanizing ways, but she establishes her lead role in the case and recognizes his good reasoning in the investigative process. So, it surprises her to find him entirely supportive and uncompetitive, even... self effacing ("My parents are still in Nebraska wondering where they went wrong.") and, again when Poole takes Pitt off the case. The handsome P.I. demonstrates something about character when he backs out of her case readily and realistically. She's relieved. Pitt doesn't behave in the expected, loathsome ways. A class act. Is that why she keeps thinking about him during idle moments?

Not that there are many. A trail of victims that seem to be related to different women suspiciously contain aspects common to the woman she knows as Tanya Starling, which keeps her chasing her target from state to state until the clues point to a systematic serial killer of multiple identities who has learned to elude detection while adding to her inventory of victims.

The pursuer-pursued contruct is gripping as the antagonists slowly migrate toward one another in a magnetic hypertension. Author Perry doesn't release his grip, keeping us balanced on a suspenseful edge with the behaviors and psychology of killer and tracker, their motivations and techniques. When the skilled, experienced killer finally fixates on the detective as the main threat to her freedom and decides to do something about it, the dramatic level turns upward at a time when visceral engagement has become somewhat detached.

Maybe analytic overextension produces objectivity or, maybe, the originality of the construct wears off because of its meticulously facile structure, but what started as boiling fascination loses fuel and drops to room temperature. Perry had me on page one... and had me barely hanging on by page 313 (out of 374). Despite that, I can't help but recommend it for the inventiveness of its characters (thinking particularly of Hobbes and Pitt, where emotional content rises to the surface, and of the colorful study of psychopathia where evil resides) and for a finely chiseled suspense stratagem. This "Nightlife" may make for a long evening, but there are corners of seductive diversion that warrant attention.