42. The Ravine by Phyllis Brett Young

Ricochet Press does great work.  They publish out of print Canadian genre fiction, mainly in the mystery and thriller category.  I've bought most of the Montreal-based ones and found this one somewhere.  The author is Canadian (and I guess was quite succesful back in her day with several books, including The Torontonians which I would like to get my hands on), though The Ravine takes place in an anonymous American small city.  I was a bit disappointed because I was hoping it was going to be about the ravine that goes through the northern part of Toronto.  I suspect she was inspired by that one.

The town is shaken up by the second rape and murder of a young girl in the aforementioned ravine (though the first girl actually survived but was a near-catatonic shell of herself).  The protagonist is a young woman artist and teacher who left her NYC upper-class background because her own sister disappeared.  She discovers the second body and sees just a flash of the killer, who looks to her like a devil.  Though she is ridiculed at the inquest for this and in the local newspaper, a doctor senses she is telling the truth and then from this figures out that the killer is one of his esteemed colleagues.  Together, she and the doctor work to capture him.  I am not spoiling anything because this is all spelled out quite early on.  I guess the suspense was supposed to be more psychological but the lack of mystery took the energy out of the book for me.  

The ravine itself is portrayed as a source of evil, in an almost Stephen King way.  It's treated as a dank, marshy tangle, dark and hateful.  This really felt like that very 20th century hatred of nature.  This bugged me.  Uncontrolled nature is not just a location where human evil can thrive but its very existence encourages human evil.  The newspaper has a campaign to cut all the trees down and build a road through it.  There is also a part where this super excellent police dog gets killed and there is zero aftermath.  His police handler doesn't even seem to care!