“Detective Sobol was attacked by an octopus?”
Gretchen is not in this book. She’s sitting in jail offscreen. Several other main characters are also just completely sidelined for this entire book. I have no idea why, but that is nowhere near the weirdest thing about this book.
Portland is flooding, and corpses are washing up on the banks of the Willamette. But Archie discovers that these are not simple drownings. These people were murdered.
By an octopus.
Yes, there is a killer using blue-ringed octopuses as his murder weapon.
And this gets serious. Henry spends most of the book in an octopus-induced coma, and he suffers lasting injury from it. Susan ends up locked in a flooded room full of poisonous octopuses with a team member, who gets stung and dies in her arms. Everybody ends up with more PTSD from this book than any other.
Meanwhile, everybody keeps jumping in the river or getting caught in raging floodwaters and surviving when they absolutely should not.
Oh yeah, and Archie kills the octopus man by punching him in the BRAIN.