The Night Bird

The Night Bird, a 2016 novel by American author Brian Freeman, follows a homicide detective and a psychiatrist, Frost Easton and Frankie Stein, who investigate a string of suspicious deaths in San Francisco. The cases are all related in that they involve women who suffer psychotic breaks leading to self-harm. Frost connects with Frankie after learning that each of the victims was enrolled in her controversial therapy practice, which purports to help people remove traumatic memories. As they carry out independent investigations, a sinister figure known as the Night Bird threatens them with cryptic messages related to the deaths. The case evolves from a traditional investigation to one in which Frankie must scrutinize her own past to understand her own level of involvement in the crimes.

The Night Bird first introduces Frankie and her role in the initial murder investigations. Frankie Stein runs a well-regarded psychiatric office, helping her patients to get past phobias and fixations by methodically altering their memories. The business is indefinitely suspended, however, because two of Frankie’s patients died during events characterized by police examiners as psychotic breaks. Though her practice remains under scrutiny, the police have turned to new evidence suggesting that the deaths were murders carried out by someone who wanted to get revenge on her. The man has learned Frankie’s memory-altering techniques and is now using them to terrify and incriminate her.

The plot turns to the death of Lucy Hagen, the second young woman to succumb to the mind tricks. One evening, while driving home from a party with a group of friends, Lucy experienced a panic attack atop the Oakland Bay Bridge. Her friend, Brynn Jamison, tried to reduce the attack by turning up the radio volume and insisting that she sing along. Lucy became very implacable, clawing at her arms and head as if tormented by an invisible foe. She then exited the car and jumped off one of the bridge’s support beams, dying on impact. When Frost investigates, he agrees with the preliminary report that she must have had a psychotic break. The second case is, in some ways, unlike the first case, in which a woman named Monica Farr committed suicide with a gun in the middle of a wedding.



Frost deduces that there must be something wrong with Frankie’s treatment. However, when he investigates the recent death of a third woman, Christie Parke, he starts to connect the deaths: A song titled “Nightingale” appears to have triggered every episode of psychosis. Frost’s scrupulous investigation yields the discovery that the Night Bird has hacked into Frankie’s cell phone, using the recordings of her sessions to strategically stage his own sinister psychiatric interventions. The Night Bird kidnapped Lucy, then reprogrammed her brain to respond to the song, and returned her, apparently unscathed and with no memory of the incident. To torment Frost, he left Lucy in a position similar to the one she found her dead sister in.

Another strange detail emerges in Frankie’s practice when Frost learns of a former patient, Todd Ferris. Todd, who would only meet Frankie outside her office, described a series of recurring dreams in which he saw women being tortured in white rooms. Moreover, Todd now claims that the women in the rooms in his dreams look just like the ones who are dying in real life. He confesses to Frankie that he feels he might be the Night Bird. However, both Frankie and Frost suspect Darren, a young local who was exonerated for the rape and murder of a college student named Merrilyn Somers. Darren’s DNA did not match the DNA found on the victim’s body, but the police suspect that he somehow swapped these pieces of evidence out before the investigation. Frankie and Frost suspect that Darren has also framed Todd for the Night Bird murders.

When Darren is murdered and Frankie is nearly killed, the protagonists’ hypothesis is thrown off again. While the police celebrate that the killer is dead, Frankie starts to remember her sessions with Darren more clearly. She recalls that he is deathly afraid of the color white, stemming from a childhood trauma in which he nearly suffocated in a collapsed snow fort. Frankie concludes that Darren’s phobia would have made him unable to torture women in rooms with white walls. At last, the protagonists discover a photo of Todd and Merilyn singing together in grade school. With this evidence of their close friendship, they deduce that Todd killed Darren as revenge for Merrilyn’s death. At the end of the novel, they are finally able to charge Todd as the Night Bird.