Evil At HeartEvil at Heart by Chelsea Cain is the third book in the New York Times best­selling series fea­tur­ing “the beauty killer” aka Gretchen Low­ell and the dam­aged cop who is obsessed with her, Archie Sheri­dan. The series is set in Port­land, Ore­gon and the nar­ra­tive is told in third per­son present tense.

I know, ser­ial killers aren’t your thing right? Well, it wasn’t mine either until I started read­ing this series. What can I say, Chelsea Cain knows how to write thrillers. The kind where you don’t want to be dis­turbed until you get to the last page. So, what did I think of this story? I’ll tell you in just a moment.

The story picks up about two months after Gretchen Lowell’s escape from prison. The Beauty Killer Task Force is recon­vened to catch her again. The Beauty Killer’s last vic­tim was Archie Sheri­dan, the lead detec­tive on the task force that was hunt­ing her down. Since the events of the last book, Archie’s taken med­ical leave from work and has vol­un­tar­ily checked him­self into a pych-ward. In this lastest entry, he’s been rel­e­gated to con­sult­ing with his part­ner, Henry Sobol, in this lat­est rash of murders.

Just to give a brief overview of this series thus far: Gretchen Low­ell, who is also known as “the beauty killer” infil­trated the task force that was look­ing for her to get to Archie. She tor­tured him for ten days in her base­ment and then mys­te­ri­ously turns her­self in and let’s him go.

Archie’s escaped her clutches twice now to live to talk about it only to have her leave him phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally scarred. He strug­gles with his love/hate rela­tion­ship with her. You see, Gretchen’s very beau­ti­ful and she uses her sex­u­al­ity to manip­u­late men to do her bid­ding and then kills them.

Evil At Heart opens with a grisly scene at a rest stop. Detec­tive Henry Sobol arrives on scene and rec­og­nizes it as the beauty killer’s hand­i­work or is it? Since Gretchen’s escape, the media has been run­ning non-stop sto­ries about her. As a result of exces­sive expo­sure, mur­ders around the world have been attrib­uted to her. And like most ser­ial killers, Gretchen always leaves her signature.

Another recur­ring char­ac­ter in the series is Susan Ward. With each new entry, Susan gets a new hair color and this time it’s pur­ple. Any­way, Susan’s a reporter for the Her­ald who wants to be taken seri­ously as a jour­nal­ist. She along with Archie and Henry have an ongo­ing work­ing rela­tion­ship. Susan shad­owed Archie while he solved the After School Stran­gler case in Heart­sick.

Susan’s humor is very wel­com­ing and actu­ally light­ens up the mood in a series that con­tin­ues to be grue­somely dark. Her inter­est­ing tid­bits of death facts were inter­spersed through­out the story and were ref­er­enced from Final Exits:The Illus­trated Ency­clo­pe­dia of How We Die by Michael Largo. Some of those facts were quite interesting.

The author makes an attempt at social satire in here in address­ing the public’s obses­sion with vio­lent crim­i­nals. The con­stant media atten­tion and pub­lic con­sump­tion of Gretchen Low­ell seems to have inspired t-shirts, ban­ners and cof­fee cups inscribed with things like: I’d kill for a cup of cof­fee. What this atten­tion has also gen­er­ated is a ser­ial killer cultist group mim­ic­k­ing the beauty killer’s past exploits.

Well, that’s essen­tially the plot for this third book in the series so now I’ll just start dis­cussing what I liked and didn’t about the novel. First, the story is very read­able. Pac­ing has never been this author’s prob­lem. The series gets even darker if you can believe that involv­ing dis­turb­ing sub­ject mat­ters of self-mutilation and sadism. Then again the whole Gretchen/Archie dynamic is dis­turb­ing as well.

More neg­a­tives. The story started to loose my inter­est about mid­way. There’s a lot of manip­u­la­tion in here as well as a lot of head games between Archie and Gretchen which we’ve come to expect. It’s get­ting to be annoy­ing. And at the end I’m sup­posed to believe that Archie has returned to his for­mer self? Really? Questionable.

All I know is that the next book in this series will be a piv­otal one for me. The con­tin­ued back and forth between Gretchen Low­ell and Archie Sheridan’s rela­tion­ship, which is at the heart of this series, is get­ting a bit old. The story is full of twists and turns with a few shock­ing scenes but still. Some­thing is missing.

EVIL AT HEART gets a low B only because I think Gretchen Low­ell has worn out her wel­come with me. It was Archie who I was most inter­ested in from the start and again, I find it ques­tion­able that he can get back to what he once was at the start of the series but I’m will­ing to wait and see what hap­pens next.

While the end­ing lays open the pos­si­bil­i­ties for more sequels, I do think it’s time to rede­fine Gretchen’s role in this series or end it. Oth­er­wise, I can’t really say I’d be inter­ested in read­ing the next one. My enthu­si­asm for this series is start­ing to dimin­ish because no new ground is being tread here. So, yes, Evil At Heart is very read­able but it will not be my favorite in the series. B-.

Addi­tion­ally, EVIL AT HEART does not stand alone well, so if you’re new to this series, you will have to read the first book, HEARTSICK to under­stand what is going on in here. It’s always been my belief that every book should be writ­ten as a stand alone even in a series if you’re try­ing to attract new read­ers. The ebook looks to be released simul­ta­ne­ously as the hard­cover via Amazon’s Kin­dle. Not sure about other etailers.

If you like Chelsea Cain, then I’d rec­om­mend Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series start­ing with Trip­tych, Alafair Burke’s Angel Tip, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series start­ing with In the Bleak Mid­win­ter and Jodi Compton’s, 37th Hour. Mostly all are char­ac­ter dri­ven mysteries.