Sweetheart

Review by New York Times Review

THE characters in Chelsea Cain's second thriller, "Sweetheart," are so cinematic that we reflexively cast the film version while reading. Bliss Mountain - that's a person, not an address - has bleached dreadlocks and a Brazilian wax in the shape of a peace sign (in protest of the "illegal war"). Her daughter, Susan, is a skittish, romantically needy newspaper reporter with hair dyed Atomic Turquoise. The setting is Portland, Ore., where the bodily pierced and yoga-enthralled mingle breezily with homesteaders and gruff civil servants. Bliss and Susan embody the tolerant milieu. But Gretchen Lowell, the soft-spoken, flawlessly pretty serial killer who first appeared in Cain's "Heartsick," has no time for urban coexistence. She's too busy killing children and seducing the book's protagonist, Detective Archie Sheridan. Gretchen kills serenely and dresses tastefully, and had her tubes tied at age 17, knowing it was probably not in the public interest for her to reproduce. She savors the suffering of others, and no profound exploration of her emotional deformity is forthcoming from the author. Sharon Stone playing the flirtatious sociopath in "Basic Instinct" comes to mind. The tale is time-honored. A refined ice woman enchants a complex but weak protagonist and cleans his clock. As a cop charged with catching the the so-called Beauty Killer in "Heartsick," Archie was duped and tortured by Gretchen. Now embroidered with surgical and emotional scars (she tied him to a gurney, forced drain cleaner down his throat, removed his spleen and carved up his torso with a scalpel), he is crawling back toward normalcy with his long-suffering wife, Debbie, and their young children. The trouble is, he feels guilty about some long-buried secret, and as a result, it becomes evident, he likes being tortured by a beautiful blonde. He shrinks from his wife's touch and has erotic fantasies about Gretchen. Archie's vulnerability is manifest in his "long nose and lopsided mouth, thick hair and sad eyes, each a physical remnant of an ancestor, black Irish, Croatian, Jewish. ... Even his genotype was tragic." But despite his self-loathing, he is profoundly likable. Addicted to pain killers, he emerges from disability leave as Gretchen (inevitably) escapes from prison. For 325 pages, we are caught up in the fear that her blood lust will lead her to his innocent family. Cain skillfully recruits us as moral caretakers as Archie struggles to overcome his sexual Stockholm syndrome and cut back on Vicodin. "Sweetheart" is a sadistic crime flick laid out on the page. But it is, simultaneously, a meditation on a commonplace woe - the scripted, suicidal midlife crisis. Archie can't stop thinking about the taut-skinned psychopath. He is enslaved by his cellphone, waiting for her to call. He has met with her regularly in prison - their version of the proverbial hotel room - to extract her confessions. He hates her and himself. He is dying to sleep with her. He is obsessed. Much is made of Gretchen's physical perfection and Archie's infatuation with her appearance, but her allure is equally tied to risk, pain and engagement with the world. The author places Archie's wife and children in the domestic shadows; they are two-dimensional and dull compared with the women Archie encounters during his workday. We wonder if he might find solace in Susan, the reporter whose naïveté is disguised by outward toughness. She wants to win prizes and attaches herself to older editors. One, recruited from a storied New York City daily, sports a ponytail. He has slept with her and let her hold his Pulitzer. This may be the only revelation in the book that makes us more physically ill than Gretchen's amateur surgery. Another of Susan's mentors, a ripe newsroom cliché, is a hard-drinking, shoe-leather journalist with a heart of gold. Fortunately, most of us have never encountered a real serial killer, so we are all too pleased to give the author license as she invents Gretchen in wanton, widescreen glory. "Sweetheart" is not a nuanced psychological thriller in the tradition of P.D. James or Margaret Atwood. The violence is too predictable and graphic to be terrifying. But the novel is sensual and engulfing. We feel Archie's every aching rib and taste the bitter narcotics he downs five pills at a time to banish his agony. We smell Gretchen's lilac perfume and the entrails she likes to leave as calling cards. But it is the marital drama entwined with the carnage - Archie's conflict, his wife's protective rage and the menace posed by the ultimate home wrecker - that keeps us turning the pages. Amy Finnerty is a freelance writer and editor in New York.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* It was apparent at the end of Cain's masterful Heartsick (2007) that we hadn't heard the last from either Gretchen Lowell, the most mesmerizing serial killer since a fellow named Hannibal, or Archie Sheridan, the Portland cop whom Gretchen tortured and then freed, locking the two of them into a creepy symbiotic relationship somewhere between Romeo and Juliet and Holmes and Moriarity. Cain picks up the story with Sheridan trying to overcome his addictions to pain pills and Gretchen, respectively, and not doing very well with either. A new case bodies found in a Portland park, near where Gretchen's first victim was discovered provides distraction as well as bringing punky, turquoise-haired reporter Susan Ward back into his life, but neither is enough to get Gretchen out of his mind. Then she escapes from prison, determined to draw Archie away from his family, away from his job, and into her arms for a deadly pas de deux. There is a little less gut-wrenching tension this time than there was in Heartsick and less gut-wrenching gore, too but there is considerably more psychological complexity, as the knot binding Archie to Gretchen tightens further. The psychosexual interplay between the two is endlessly fascinating and, amazingly, thoroughly believable. In addition, Cain gives more space to her supporting cast especially reporter Ward, who seems ready for a starring role herself. It's hard to say how long Cain can play out this lovers' duel between Archie and Gretchen before they tumble into their own Reichenbach Falls, but it's a sure thing we won't be leaving our seats before the final curtain.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Starred Review. In Cain's superb follow-up to Heartsick, damaged detective Archie Sheridan is back home in Portland, Ore., trying to resume a normal life. Archie's ties to serial killer Gretchen Lowell still run deep, even if he's stopped their weekly visits in prison. Meanwhile, reporter Susan Ward is finishing an article accusing a beloved U.S. senator of seducing his children's 14-year-old babysitter a decade earlier. When three bodies are discovered in a local park--where Archie's team found Gretchen's first victim 12 years earlier--Archie worries another serial killer is at large. After the senator's unexpected death, Susan discovers links between the sex scandal and the bodies in the park. When Gretchen escapes from prison, Archie knows he's the only one who can stop her from killing. In Cain's capable hands, Gretchen is both a monster and the only person who truly understands Archie's pain. With its brisk pacing, carefully metered violence and tortured hero, Cain's sophomore effort will leave readers desperate for more. 200,000 first printing. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Strung-out police detective Archie Sheridan, still haunted by serial killer Gretchen Lowell, returns in Cain's high-octane follow-up to Heartsick. This time the first murder victim shows up in a park, followed by spare parts in a nearby doghouse. But trouble truly explodes when Hannibal Lector-like imprisoned killer Gretchen is beaten, her guard hangs himself, and--we saw this coming--she escapes. When Gretchen threatens Archie's children at school, he goes off the deep end and concocts his own plan to bring her in. More interesting is the subplot involving intrepid newspaper journalist Susan Ward, who loses her mentor in a suspicious car crash that also kills the popular senator whose sexual escapades she was planning to expose. Trouble is, her source shows up dead, too. Straddling both cases, Susan convinces Archie's partner, Henry, to drive straight into a major forest fire because she has figured out Archie's location. Sweetheart struggles under the weight of our expectations; it doesn't work well unless you've read the astonishing Heartsick. Nonetheless, expect high demand and a large marketing campaign. Recommended for all popular collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08.]--Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib., Fairfield, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The seductive force of the murderess who tortured and maimed him continues to complicate the workaday life of a hard-used policeman in Portland, Ore. The weird relationship between police detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, established in Cain's 2007 Heartsick, has not been weakened by Gretchen's imprisonment. Even as he carries out his forensic duties, and much to the detriment of his embattled marriage, Archie keeps his meetings with gorgeous but gruesome Gretchen. (Before she went to the Big House, Gretchen reached into Archie's thorax and plucked out his spleen.) The visits with Gretchen ostensibly have to do with the need to pry from her the full list of her scores of victims, but if that weren't on the to-do list, Archie would probably find some other excuse to drop in on the woman the papers call the Beauty Killer. He certainly doesn't need the distraction. Bodies are continuing to turn up in the underbrush in a downtown city park, and a beloved senator has just plunged to his death from a Willamette River Bridge alongside a nosy journalist. The late reporter's blue-haired newspaper colleague Susan Ward has taken copious notes on all the corpses. She was about to break the long-hidden story of the senator's rape of a 14-year-old girl just before the accident, but now her editors have stepped on the report. Susan's not about to give up pushing her way into Archie's investigation. Then all hell breaks loose when Gretchen escapes. Archie knows his enchantress has engineered her jailbreak in order to get her hands back on the man she loves and loves to disembowel. Susan sticks with the story even as everything goes up in flames in one of those impressive Pacific Northwest forest fires. Gretchen requires heavily engineered suspension of disbelief, but there are numerous thrills to be had and, underneath the Grand Guignol, there's a perfectly normal detective story. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Forest Park was pretty in the summer. Portland's ash sky was barely visible behind a canopy of aspens, hemlock, cedars, and maples that filtered the light to a shimmering pale green. A light breeze tickled the leaves. Morning glories and ivy crept up the mossy tree trunks and strangled the blackberry bushes and ferns, a mass of crawling vines that piled up waist-high on either side of the packed dirt path. The creek hummed and churned, birds chirped. It was all very lovely, very Walden, except for the corpse. The woman had been dead awhile. Her skull was exposed; her scalp had been pulled back, a tangle of red hair separated from the hairline by several inches. Animals had eaten her face, exposing her eyes and brain to the forces of putrefaction. Her nose was gone, revealing the triangular bony notch beneath it; her eye sockets were concave bowls of greasy, soaplike fat. The flesh of her neck and ears was blistered and curdled, peeled back in strips to frame that horrible skull face, mouth open like a Halloween skeleton. "Are you there?" Archie turned his attention back to the cell phone he held against his ear. "Yeah." "Want me to wait on dinner?" He glanced down at the dead woman, his mind already working the case. Could be an OD. Could be murder. Could be she fell from the wheel well of a 747. Archie had seen that last one on an episode of Law & Order . "I'm thinking no," he said into the phone. He could hear the familiar concern in Debbie's voice. He'd been doing well. He'd cut back on the pain pills, gained a little weight. But he and Debbie both knew it was all too tenuous. Mostly, he pretended. He pretended to live, to breathe, to work; he pretended he was going to be okay. It seemed to help the people he loved. And that was something. He could do that, at least, for them. "Be sure you eat something," she said with a sigh. "I'll grab something with Henry." Archie flipped the phone shut and dropped it into his coat pocket. His fingers touched the brass pillbox that was also in his pocket, and lingered there for a moment. It had been more than two and a half years since his ordeal. He'd only been off medical leave a few months. Long enough to catch his second serial killer. He was thinking of getting some business cards made up: SERIAL KILLER APPREHENSION SPECIALIST. Maybe something embossed. His head hurt and he reflexively moved to open the lid of the pillbox, then let his fingers drop and lifted his hand from his pocket and ran it through his hair. No. Not now. He squatted next to Lorenzo Robbins, who sat on his heels inches from the body, his dreadlocks hidden under the hood of his white Tyvek suit. The smooth stones of the creek bed were slick with moss. "That your wife?" Robbins asked. Archie pulled a small notebook and a pen out of his other pocket. A flashbulb went off as a crime photographer took a picture behind them. "My ex-wife." "You guys still close?" Archie drew an outline of the woman in his notebook. Marked where the surrounding trees were, the creek below. "We live together." "Oh." The flashbulb went off again. "It's a long story," Archie said, rubbing his eyes with one hand. Robbins used a pair of forceps to lift the woman's loose scalp, so he could peer under it. When he did, dozens of black ants scurried out over her skull and into the decomposing tissue inside her nasal aperture. "Dogs have been here." "Wild?" Archie asked, twisting around to look up at the thick surrounding forest. Forest Park was five thousand acres, the largest urban wilderness park in the country. Parts of it were remote; parts of it were crowded. The area where the body had been found was in the lower part of the park, which was frequented by a steady stream of joggers, hikers, and mountain bikers. Several houses were even visible up the hillside. "Domestic probably," Robbins said. He turned and jabbed a latex-gloved thumb up the hillside. "Way the body's down here behind the scrub, can't see it from the path. People come running through with their dogs off leash. Sparky scrambles down here, tears a hunk of cheek off the corpse." He looked down at the corpse and shrugged. "They think he's found a dead bird or whatever. Owner lets him sniff around a little. Then they run on." "You're saying she was eaten by pugs?" "Over time. A few weeks." Archie shook his head. "Nice." Robbins raised an eyebrow as he glanced back up at the path. "Funny no one smelled anything." "There was a sewer leak," Archie said. "One of the houses at the top of the hill." The eyebrow shot up another few millimeters. "For two weeks?" Archie drew the hiking path across the page of his notebook. It was maybe forty feet above, at its closest point. Then it curved and headed farther up the hillside, deeper into the woods. "People rationalize." "You thinking she was a prostitute?" "Based on the shoes?" She was still wearing one--an amber Lucite pump. The other they had found nestled in moss underneath a fern a few yards away. "Maybe. Maybe she was a stylish thirteen year-old. Hard to tell." Archie looked at the grinning mouth, the teeth straight and white against all the surrounding blood and gristle. "She's got nice teeth." "Yeah," Robbins agreed softly. "She's got nice teeth." Archie watched as his partner, Henry Sobol, came slowly, tentatively, down the hillside. He was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, despite the heat. Henry kept his eyes down, lips pursed in concentration, arms outstretched for balance. With his arms extended and his shaved head, he looked like a circus strongman. He walked sideways, trying to step in Archie's footprints, but his feet were bigger than Archie's and each step sent a spit of dirt and small rocks rattling down the embankment. Above them, on the hillside, Archie could see that everyone had stopped to watch, their faces anxious. A homeless man looking for a place to set up camp had found the body and called the police from a convenience store a few blocks outside the park. He had met the first officer to respond and taken him to the site, where the officer had promptly lost his footing in the loose dirt and slid down the hillside into the creek, polluting the crime scene and nearly breaking his leg. They would have to wait for the autopsy results to even know if they had a homicide. Henry reached the bottom, winked at Archie, and then turned and waved merrily up above. The cops at the top of the hill all turned back to their work taping the crime scene off, and keeping the growing group of sportily dressed hikers and joggers at bay. Henry smoothed his salt-and-pepper mustache thoughtfully with a thumb and forefinger and rocked forward to examine the body, allowing himself a reflexive grimace. Then business. "What killed her?" he asked. Robbins placed a bag over one of her bloated, mottled hands and secured it with a twist-tie. He did it gingerly, as if she had nodded off and he didn't want to wake her. The fingers curled, blistered and swollen, and the nail beds were black, but the hand was still recognizable, though probably not printable. The other, which lay half buried in the earth and moss, was crawling with beetles. "Search me," Robbins said. "She die here?" Henry asked. "Hard to say until we know what killed her," Robbins answered. He gazed up at Henry. "Do you wax your head or is it naturally that shiny?" Archie smiled. Henry had called Robbins out at the police softball game that spring. It had been like this ever since. "I was just asking," Henry said to Robbins. "Ask me after the autopsy," Robbins muttered. He produced another bag and gave it a snap in the air, and then gently lifted her other hand so he could slide it into the bag. The beetles scattered, and Henry took a small step back. Archie wrote something in his notebook. It had been thirteen years since they had stood over another dead girl in that park. That had set them on the trail of the Beauty Killer. They didn't know back then it would become a career. Or that Archie would become one of her victims. A voice from up the hillside hollered, "Hey." Henry looked up at the path, where Claire Masland was waving for them to come back up the hill. He put his hands on his hips. "You've got to be kidding me," he said to Archie. Claire motioned again. This time she put her whole arm into it. "I'll go first," Archie said. He glanced back at Henry and added, "So when you fall you won't take us both down." "Ha, ha," said Henry. "What do you have?" Archie asked Claire when they reached the path. Claire was small and angular with a very short haircut. She was wearing a striped T-shirt and jeans. Her gold shield was clipped to her waistband, along with a phone, a gun in a leather holster, and a pair of red plastic sunglasses jauntily hooked through a belt loop. She tilted her head at a young uniformed cop who was covered in dirt. "This is Officer Bennett," she said. "The first responder." Bennett looked like a kid, tall with a baby face and a slight double chin that pressed fretfully against a skinny neck. He hunched his shoulders miserably. "I'm so sorry," he said. "Show them," Claire told Bennett. He sighed glumly and turned around. He had taken a header down the ravine and his uniform was stained with muck, and tiny bits of vegetation still clung to his shirt. Both Henry and Archie leaned forward to get a better look. Clinging to Bennett's shoulder blade, among the fern seeds, the moss particulate, and the dirt, was, unmistakably, a clue. Henry looked at Archie. "That would be a human hair," he said. "When you, uh, fell," Archie asked Bennett. "Did you actually make contact with the body?" Bennett's spine stiffened. "Jesus no, sir. I swear." "Must have picked it up on the way down," said Henry. Archie pulled a slim black flashlight out of his pocket and shone it along the length of the red hair. He held it for Henry to look. There was a tiny clump of tissue at the base of the hair. "It's got a scalp fragment on it," Archie said. Bennett whipped his head around, eyes wide. "Get it off me," he pleaded. "Get it off me, okay?" "Easy, son," Henry said. Claire, who was a good foot shorter than Bennett, reached up and plucked the hair off and dropped it in an evidence bag. Archie called a crime scene tech over. "Bag all his clothes. Socks, everything." "But what will I wear?" Bennett asked as the crime scene tech led him off. Claire turned to Archie and Henry. The path they were on was about three feet wide, carved worryingly out of the hillside. The back foot of it had been taped off to let the fifty-year-old women by, so they didn't have to backtrack a mile into the woods and miss afternoon spa appointments. A chocolate Lab bounded through the foliage on the hillside as its owner, in cargo shorts, hiking books, and reflective sunglasses, walked past without even a second glance at the activity at the bottom of the glen. "So?" Claire said. "Head injury," said Archie. "Yep," said Henry. "Maybe she fell," Claire theorized. "Like T. J. Hooker, there. Hit her head on a rock." "Or maybe the rock hit her," Henry said. "Or," Archie said, "maybe Sparky scrambled down there and stuck his snout in our corpse, and the hair dropped off his tongue on his way back up the embankment." Claire and Henry both looked at Archie. "Sparky?" Henry said. "That is so gross," said Claire. Excerpted from Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain Copyright (c) 2008 by Verite Published in 2008 by St. Martin's Minotaur All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher Excerpted from Sweetheart: A Thriller by Chelsea Cain All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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