Heart Sick by Chelsea CainHeart Sick (2007) by Chelsea Cain opens with a grisly flash­back of Gretchen Low­ell, ham­mer­ing nails into the chest of the lead detec­tive of the Beauty Killer Task force.

For ten years the task force had been track­ing down a ser­ial killer who was leav­ing 23 bod­ies across state lines. Only prob­lem was that who they were look­ing for was a woman — not a man. A fact that the best FBI pro­filer had missed that ended up almost cost­ing lead detec­tive Archie Sheri­dan his life.

Heart­sick is a good story but it is far from per­fect. Dam­aged cop, Archie Sheri­dan returns to work after 2 years of recov­er­ing from his injuries. He is asked to be lead detec­tive of another task force that is search­ing for a ser­ial rapist/murderer. When the story opens, 2 girls are dead and one is miss­ing in the city of Port­land. Most of the offi­cers from the Beauty Killer Task Force are recon­vened to work on the case. Archie is still frag­ile, sur­viv­ing on a cock­tail of meds to keep up appear­ances. He still strug­gles from the after­math of his cap­ture from a psy­chopath who infil­trated his task force to get to him.

Archie returns to police work with some set con­di­tions that includes hav­ing a jour­nal­ist on board to shadow him. Enter, Susan Ward, a jour­nal­ist for the Her­ald, who is nabbed for this assign­ment after a juicy story she’s work­ing on goes nowhere. Like Archie, Susan’s dam­aged. Her past reads like your typ­i­cal teen on the brink of cri­sis: father died when she was young dur­ing a vul­ner­a­ble period of her life. Mother is just a tad bit eccen­tric encour­ag­ing her daugh­ter to be inde­pen­dent. Now a jour­nal­ist, Susan’s shock of pink hair and style of dress often has other peo­ple mis­tak­ing her for a high school kid. She wants to be taken seri­ously as a jour­nal­ist but she has too many hang-ups and sleeps with mar­ried men (a big no-no).

This novel really tries too hard to work on your psy­che in how the reader should under­stand Archie and Gretchen’s killer/victim rela­tion­ship. Since Archie’s escape from her base­ment, he’s been estranged from his fam­ily and makes weekly vis­its to the pen to visit Gretchen. She will only give Archie her con­fes­sions, mak­ing his trips to visit her a nec­es­sary evil. At one point in the story Gretchen asks: “Do you know what’s more inti­mate than sex?” Her answer of “vio­lence” gives the reader a moment of clar­ity into this sor­did rela­tion­ship because this book is more about them than it is about solv­ing another murder.

The cur­rent case is told along­side flash­backs of Archie’s cap­tiv­ity in Gretchen’s base­ment. Most of it is pretty grue­some stuff so if you have a weak stom­ach, you might want to give this one a pass. Heart­sick has been get­ting some buzz and some of my expec­ta­tions were met. I must admit that the most intrigu­ing char­ac­ter for me was Archie. He’s dam­aged and I like dam­aged. He’s the main draw for me if I were to read the sequels. The pac­ing is pretty good even as it stum­bles towards its very weak con­clu­sion. Over­all, a good, well paced story that is pre­dictable and uno­rig­i­nal in the dam­aged cop/serial killer sub genre. My grade, B. Sequels are in the works.

This book has an excerpt you can read here and is avail­able in the fol­low­ing for­mats: hard­cover, audio­book CD, audio down­load and ebook at Mobipocket.

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*****

Heart­sick by Chelsea Cain is now out in paper­back. I thought I’d dust off this review and repost it since I read it last year. I thought the debut was a pretty good effort from a first-timer and promises to be another engross­ing series. The sequel, Sweet­heart, is set to release in hard­cover on 9.2.08 and it has the coolest book trailer, too.