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Summary
Summary
In this riveting debut thriller, Chelsea Cain introduces an unforgettable female serial killer and a homicide detective more human than heroic.
Author Notes
Writer Chelsea Cain was born in Iowa City, Iowa on February 5, 1972 and lived on a commune in Iowa and then in Bellingham, Washington. She studied political science at the University of California at Irvine, graduating in 1994. She also attended the University of Iowa's graduate school of journalism and has written for several newspapers, including The Oregonian. While at Iowa, she wrote a weekly column for The Daily Iowan. Her master¿s thesis at the University of Iowa became Dharma Girl, a memoir about Cain's early childhood on the hippie commune. One of her professors presented it to several editors for review, and Seal Press picked it up as Cain's first published work. She was 24 years old. Cain publishes in several genres and has penned a memoir, works of humor, and thrillers. After working as a Creative Director at a PR firm in Portland for several years, Cain began writing humor books in her spare time, including The Hippie Handbook: How to Tie-Dye a T-Shirt, Flash a Peace Sign, and Other Essential Skills for the Carefree Life Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, and Does this Cape Make Me Look Fat? Pop-Psychology for Superheroes, which Cain co-wrote with her husband. Cain also composed a weekly column for Portland¿s alternative newspaper, The Portland Mercury,and started contributing to Portland¿s major daily, The Oregonian in 2003when she left marketing behind to focus on writing full-time. Her last column with The Oregonian was posted on December 28, 2008. She wrote her first thriller Heartsick in 2004, while pregnant with her daughter. It was published in 2007, and was an instant New York Times Bestseller along wirh her other works Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, and Let Me Go.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-The shocking opening chapter of this thriller lets readers know they're in for a rough ride through the minds of damaged people, including a drug-addicted police detective and an ambitious newspaper reporter. Two years earlier, a sadistic female serial killer captured and tortured Archie Sheridan, the lead detective on the Beauty Killer Task Force, leaving an indelible impression on his psyche and numerous physical scars. Now a new serial killer is stalking Portland, OR, and Archie is called back to duty to head a new task force. Susan Ward, a bright, offbeat reporter, is surprised to get the inside track on the investigation from him. It seems that he is finally willing to expose his feelings about Gretchen Lowell, the Beauty Killer, but Susan will have to reveal her secrets as well. Vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin's, 1988), with the setup of the serial-killer psychiatrist trading information while working her own angle, the novel has plenty of gruesome details, building suspense, false leads, and startling imagery in a setting so realistic that readers will feel damp and chilled. This one is for teens who like their stories gritty, grim, and gory.-Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCormick delivers an uneven performance in her reading of Cain's bestselling debut thriller. Gretchen Lowell, "The Beauty Killer," was one of the most prolific serial killers in history, claiming over 200 lives. Her only surviving victim was Archie Sheridan, the lead detective on the task force set up to apprehend her. Archie was tortured for days until Lowell inexplicably turned herself in. Two years later Archie is still a victim, on leave from the force, estranged from his family, addicted to pain pills and obsessively visiting Gretchen weekly. When a new killer begins murdering teenage girls, Archie is called back into action. By his side is an ambitious, pink-haired news reporter who may become her own page-one headline. The usually reliable McCormick has a rocky start with the first few chapters. Her clipped, overarticulation of each line keeps listeners at a distance instead of immersing them in the mesmerizing events taking place. However, she does improve as the story moves forward, and her rich, throaty portrayal of Gretchen Lowell is the perfect blend of predator and seductress. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin's Minotaur hardcover (Reviews, July 16). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A detective, emotionally damaged after his own kidnapping, pursues a serial killer of young girls in Portland, Ore. Two years ago, homicide detective Archie Sheridan was kidnapped while tracking beautiful but treacherously demented serial killer Gretchen Lowell. After torturing Archie for days, Gretchen eventually saved his physical life by calling 911 and turning herself in, but Archie's existence has been fundamentally ruined. Separated from his wife, he is addicted to various prescription painkillers and remains on disability from his work as a homicide detective. Every Sunday Archie visits Gretchen in prison, ostensibly because he is the only one to whom she'll disclose the locations of her 200 (!) murder victims. In fact, he is addicted to her control over him. Despite Archie's fragile emotional state, when someone starts murdering 14-year-old girls, the police department asks him to take charge of the case. As the cop who survived a kidnapping, Archie has become a celebrity, and the local paper arranges for a young reporter, Susan Ward, to profile him as he works the new case. Susan does not realize that Archie is manipulating her. He hopes her revealing articles about him spurs Gretchen, who has recently gone silent, to offer up the whereabouts of more bodies. Susan finds easy access to interviews with Archie's ex-wife Debbie, who turns out to be a sophisticated artist, his doctor, who describes Archie's torture as unimaginably cruel, and even Gretchen, who is frighteningly on target about Susan's own ghosts. Susan's father died when she was 14. As a freshman at Cleveland High, where one of the recent victims attended school, she may or may not have had an inappropriate sexual relationship with her drama teacher. Archie realizes almost too late that Gretchen has actually been setting her own trap, and Susan is the intended victim. Despite obvious red herrings, Cain (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, 2005) creates a cleverly contorted thriller plot and characters with memorable personalities. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
"*Starred Review* It's a long way from a Nancy Drew parody (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, 2005) to one of the most original serial-killer thrillers to appear in several years, but Cain makes the leap unscathed. Throw out all your assumptions about the sameness of serial-killer novels; this one breaks the mold. Yes, the notorious Gretchen Lowell is behind bars throughout the novel (a la Hannibal Lecter), and, yes, she counsels the Portland, Oregon, cop who is chasing a new sociopath, but unlike in Silence of the Lambs, Archie Sheridan, Cain's detective hero, was one of Lowell's victims. (After kidnapping and killing more than 200 people, Lowell captured and tortured Sheridan, then inexplicably let him live.) So two plotlines unfold alternately, each feeding the other: the grisly backstory of what Lowell did to Sheridan ( Whatever you think this is going to be like, she whispers, it's going to be worse ), and the real-time account of Sheridan's search for a new serial killer who is preying on teenage girls from Portland's high schools. The plots are thickened by costar Susan Ward, a pink-haired, punky reporter, and by Sheridan's addiction to prescription drugs and his unbreakable emotional attachment to Lowell, his torturer and savior. Cain never misses a beat here, turning the psychological screws ever tighter for both Sheridan and Ward while drawing us deep into the nightmare that lives inside Gretchen Lowell's head. Sheridan will remind thriller fans of Ridley Pearson's Lou Boldt, and Cain's use of Portland as a setting contrasting the charm of the city against the horror of the crimes echoes Pearson's similar use of Seattle. But Heartsick is in no way deriviative. This could well be the thriller of the year."--"Ott, Bill" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AILEEN WUORNOS. Blanche Moore. Velma Barfield. Granted, mug shots don't command the services of stylists and makeup artists, and the lighting down at the precinct is probably fluorescent, but the average female serial killer is no drop-dead beauty. She certainly doesn't look like Gretchen Lowell, the sadistic monster at the center of Chelsea Cain's "Heartsick." Blond Gretchen's eyes are "large and pale blue and her features ... perfectly symmetrical." She has "wide cheekbones, a long sculpted nose, a heart-shaped face" and a "long, aristocratic neck." So overwhelming are Gretchen's charms that Archie Sheridan, the police detective she tortured to death and then revived, still fantasizes about her, slipping his fingers inside his shirt when no one's looking to trace the valentine-shaped scar she carved into his chest with an X-Acto knife. One of the challenges for the thriller writer who takes on the catch-the-serial-killer subgenre is the ever escalating ante, one author's diabolically perverse criminal demanding the next's invention of a murderer just that much more diabolical and perverse. In Gretchen Lowell, Cain has created a femme fatale with an appetite for cruelty that will be difficult to surpass. Gretchen is hammering nails into Archie's ribs when we meet her in the opening flashback; now she's in jail entertaining weekly visits from him. Archie returns to his would-be killer's side in hopes of learning where she dumped her victims. Just how many people did she murder before he caught her? But, no, wait - wasn't it she who caught him? "Gretchen was in prison. And Archie was free. Funny. Sometimes it still felt like the other way around." The formula of an ambitious but damaged cop who becomes emotionally entangled with a brilliant psychopath who manipulates him or her from behind bars belongs to Thomas Harris, whose Hannibal Lecter has become the model for the subgenre's twisted genius. But Cain makes an adjustment to the central cast Harris featured in "The Silence of the Lambs" - a jailed serial killer, an F.B.I. special agent, his protégé and an active killer - subtracting one cop and adding a journalist. Susan Ward, assigned by The Oregon Herald to write a series of articles profiling Archie Sheridan, renowned for stopping if not exactly outsmarting Gretchen Lowell, tags along to murder scenes and takes notes on her subject and his methods. Although the ending will reveal a more integral, punch-line kind of connection, most of the novel uses Susan's reporting as the intersection - beyond Archie's traumatic memories of being tortured - between Gretchen's halted career as a serial killer and the new series of brutal murders that has put an end to the leave of absence Archie took in the wake of Gretchen's savagery. Someone is kidnapping teenage girls from Portland. "He kills them," Archie says, reviewing the predator's M.O. "He sexually assaults them. And he soaks them in a tub of bleach until he decides to dump them." Cain weaves the two narratives together cleverly, interrupting the detective's pursuit of the current murderer with flashbacks to Gretchen's relentless and at times nauseating ministrations to Archie's naked body, strapped to a gurney in a basement outfitted like an operating theater with "medical-looking machinery, a drain on the cement floor." As told from Archie's point of view, his focus blurred by pain, occasional losses of consciousness, the stench of a putrefying corpse nearby and the "medicine" Gretchen forces down his throat with a funnel, the torture scenes are erotic, if you like that kind of thing. Gretchen appears as an angel of death, speaking in a bedroom "voice just above a whisper," calling Archie her "darling," smelling of lilacs and running "her fingertips lightly along the skin of his arm." The French may refer to an orgasm as "la petite mort," but a lust murderer coming off a 10-year spree requires a bigger and more definitive climax. "Whatever you think this is going to be like," Gretchen coos in Archie's ear, "it's going to be worse." The body she leaves him, ravished with knives, nails and more, is so thoroughly broken that Archie is addicted to painkillers, swallowing enough Vicodin each day that he is "high ... in a state of perpetual in-between," his consciousness altered to the point that it seems to enhance his skills as a detective. "Heartsick" is a dizzying novel. Lurid and suspenseful with well-drawn characters, plenty of grisly surprises and tart dialogue, it delivers what readers of this particular kind of thriller expect. But the risk of emulating a virtuoso long-time best seller like "The Silence of the Lambs" is failing to equal it. "Heartsick" is not as elegantly conceived as its model. The idea of using one psycho killer to catch another is hard to improve; replacing a cop with a journalist involves creating a separate workplace, loosens structure and slackens tension. To save lives, the F.B.I.'s Clarice Starling of "The Silence of the Lambs" must return to Hannibal for his help. Until the revelation at the end of "Heartsick," Gretchen's bearing on Archie's new case is peripheral, her relationship with him apparently not necessary to his success as a detective. And Gretchen herself, despite her delicate looks, is not the exquisite Dr. Lecter, a culturally fluent cannibal who peppers his conversation with allusions to Renaissance art, publishes articles in The Journal of Clinical Psychology and reminisces about enjoying a victim's liver "with some fava beans and a big Amarone." Hannibal's preternatural intellect allows him to penetrate Clarice's mind, her soul. He opens her without a scalpel; prison bars and shackles can't protect a person from his kind of plundering. Gretchen, shattering ribs and force-feeding Archie drain cleaner until he vomits blood, is comparably clumsy in her approach. Her victim returns to her not because he seeks illumination but because beautiful Gretchen, like the vagina dentata she is, has consumed him. Archie cannot find himself without going to her. "You died," she explains. "But I brought you back. ... Because we're not done yet." Murder is, of course, a means of asserting power, and in terms of the archetypes that animate thrillers, film noir, comic books and other popular culture, beauty is a trope for female power just as intellectual prowess represents male potency. The femme fatale has been around so long - remember the sirens of Greek mythology? - that the female killer's audience expects, perhaps demands, beauty in proportion to viciousness. Innocence has a plainer face. Because the journalist Susan Ward is "striking," her "rosebud mouth" must be balanced, defeminized, by her "large forehead" (i.e., intelligence). The genre's terms dictate that Susan prove her goodness by intentionally playing down her looks, wearing her hair short like a "deranged flapper" and dyeing it pink so it "distracted from the sweetness of her features." Herein lies an essential difference between the ill-favored Aileen Wuornoses of the world and the lovely Gretchen Lowell, between true-crime serial killers and the femme fatale. Not only does Gretchen's physical perfection allow her to attract and manipulate her victims, but it also protects her from the suspicion of a largely male police force, all too easily discombobulated by her big blue eyes. "She's a psychopath," protests one of Archie's female colleagues, unaffected by a woman's wiles, when she catches him sneaking off to visit Gretchen. "Yeah," he agrees, "but she's my psychopath." Who belongs to whom may never be resolved, but as Gretchen says, "we're not done yet." Sequels are in the works. The female killers audience expects beauty in proportion to viciousness. Innocence has a plainer face. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is a novel, "Envy." Her forthcoming work of nonfiction, "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family," will be published in 2008.
Library Journal Review
Police detective Archie Sheridan has been on sick leave for almost two years after being kidnapped and tortured by serial killer Gretchen Lowell. The appearance of a new killer brings Archie back to work. While Archie attends to the new case, he continues to visit Gretchen in prison; her psychological hold over him remains as she doles out the names of her 200 victims, one by one. Then a local high school teacher is found dead. Was he the new killer committing suicide, or is it a setup? Cain (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth) resides in Portland, OR, where her story is set, and this gives richness to her descriptions. Her characters are spooky, with lots of quirks and human failings. Well read by Carolyn McCormick, Heartsick is recommended for general fiction collections. [BBC Audiobooks America also has a version available: 9 CDs. unabridged. 13 hrs. 2007. ISBN 978-0-7927-5022-2. $89.95.-Ed.]-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.