'Heartsick' by Chelsea Cain, 9/29/09

This is the first book review I have written since high school, so it's completely amateur.  I am a newbie at this and hope to get better the more I do it.

The main character in the story is Detective Archie Sheridan. Not only did he spend 10 years trying to capture The Beauty Killer, he became her last victim. You read that right, HER last victim… and the only one she let live. For reasons unknown, Gretchen Lowell turns herself in to save his life.


A couple years later, high school girls are being murdered in Portland, Oregon. Detective Sheridan is now addicted to pain killers and weekly visits with Gretchen. He is taken off medical leave to lead a new task force to find the killer of the high school girls. The catch is that Susan Ward, a reporter, gets to be with him, follow the investigation and write a series of articles all about Sheridan.

Throughout the book the characters are forced to look into their pasts to save more girls from being murdered in the future.

This book was original in the fact that the lead serial killer is female. Gretchen has the ability to bend people to her will without them even realizing it, including Detective Sheridan. The bond between Gretchen and Sheridan is creepy, yet you want to understand what happened as she was torturing him while she held him captive for 10 days that caused him to almost need her after the fact.

Susan Ward seems to be a random person at the beginning of the book, but by the end you want to kick yourself for not seeing her role in the first place. She is feisty and outgoing, doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She does what she needs to in order to get her story.

Many stories you see or shows you watch are all about the technical jargon relating to time and cause of death and the motive of the killer. The major purpose of the story, for me at least, was that the characters connections to each other were more important than the number of people that Gretchen had killed and more important than a time line of death. ‘Heartsick’ was nonstop from the beginning. I couldn’t put it down so I read it in one day.

What I didn’t really like, or at least am not used too, is the lack of total background to one or more of the characters. You don’t really get a sense that you know any of them by the end. However, I think that’s part of the point, you aren’t supposed to truly know any of them.

This is the first in a series of novels. Although I can see where the story could go from the end of this book, I don’t think it needs more for people to enjoy it. It stands well on its own. But, because I like series, I imagine that I will eventually read all of them in time.