Heartsick - Chelsea Cain

Guest Reviewer: Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver is the internationally number one bestselling author of 23 thrillers and collections of short stories. He's the author of The Bone Collector, which was a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and most recently The Sleeping Doll.

In the last twenty years we've seen a huge escalation of thrillers whose antagonist is an id-driven sociopath with flexible working hours, plenty of duct tape and a shovel--so much so that it's increasingly hard to tell a serial killer tale in a fresh and compelling way. Yet Chelsea Cain has managed to do just that in Heartsick.

For years a joint taskforce based in Portland, Oregon, pursued the "Beauty Killer," who tortured, dismembered and murdered victims throughout the Northwest. (The nickname came not from the fact the killer was an attractive woman, which she happened to be, but from a medical examiner's observation that one of her torture-murders was a real "beauty.")

Patient and brilliant, the killer stayed a step ahead of her pursuers for ten years. Personnel on the taskforce would come and go but one cop remained a constant fixture, lead detective Archie Sheridan, who was relentless to the point of obsession in his handling of the investigation.

Too relentless for his own good, as it turned out. After dozens of kills, the murderer, Gretchen Lowell, grew weary of her standard fare and went for a variation. She kidnapped Sheridan himself. Drain cleaner and surgery without anesthetic typified his days in her basement. She went so far as to kill him but then, curiously, she changed her mind and revived the hapless man just in time. She called 911, got him to a hospital and turned herself in.

Off she went to prison for life, leaving Sheridan a shell of a man, divorced and living on disability, addicted to pain killers and, more harrowingly, to Gretchen Lowell herself, whom he visited regularly to learn the location of her victims' bodies--information she doled out on whim, the same way she administered IV drugs during Sheridan's captivity to prolong the torture.

Heartsick opens in the present, two years after Lowell went to prison. Portland is plagued by a new killer and another victim, a teenage girl, has vanished. Archie Sheridan is pressed back into service to track the murderer down, and the Beauty Killer taskforce is reunited. Complicating the investigation, and Sheridan's fragile, solitary life, is ambitious yet insecure newspaper reporter, Susan Ward. Pink-haired, clad in cowboy boots and alternative rock group t-shirts, Ward is pulled off a politically awkward story and told to profile Sheridan, in what appears to be a kiss-and-make-up gesture after a media-police brouhaha during the Beauty Killer investigation some years ago.

Cain masterfully weaves a number of story lines together--the hunt for the After School Strangler by the pill-popping cop and his associates, flashbacks to Sheridan and Lowell in her grim basement, Ward's pursuit of the story that'll make her career (and the one that could destroy it) and Sheridan's one-step-forward-two-back struggle to re-emerge as a feeling human being.

Among the most harrowing scenes are those in the Oregon prison where Archie Sheridan continues to meet with his former captor, who, though deprived of her implements of torture, has lost none of her talent for sadism.

The story moves forward on a sure track and accelerates appropriately toward the end when another schoolgirl is kidnapped and has only hours to live. Heartsick is not, however, a roller coaster. It's a methodical, brilliantly realized examination of human beings and the torture both literal and metaphoric they experience as they live their complex lives. We see ourselves and people close to us perfectly reflected in Archie Sheridan and Susan Ward. That same could be said of Cain's palm-sweating portrayal of Gretchen Lowell, but I'll take those insights on faith; none of my friends--to the best of my knowledge--stick a scalpel in somebody's chest and then twist, saying, "I don't like to be ignored. Understand?"

The appeal in most serial killer fiction comes from amped-up violence and blood (plenty of that here) and a race against time, with the sides of good and evil drawn clearly and known from the outset. Cain, though, creates a more nuanced story that blends this concept of thriller with the classic mystery elements of whodunit and why it was done.

On one level Heartsick is a well-crafted three-dead-and-a-bunch-to-go thriller, entertaining and exhilarating. Yet it's more. It's about dependency, about people using their fellow human beings. Sometimes the motive for that is symbiotic and worthy, allowing us to emerge as whole creatures. Other times it's exploitative or, at worst, horrific, as when the After School Strangler or Gretchen Lowell use their helpless victims to satisfy unspeakable needs.

In the end, the author makes clear that that the more powerful weapon isn't the scalpel that cuts flesh and organ, but the resolution and courage to cut ourselves free from what controls us.

--Jeffery Deaver

(photo credit: Charles Harris)

Questions for Chelsea Cain

Amazon.com: Gretchen Lowell haunts every page of Heartsick. Even when she actually appears in the jail scenes with Sheridan, she reveals nothing, and yet it's obvious she's anything but one-dimensional. What is her story?

Cain: I purposely didn't reveal Gretchen's past, beyond a few unreliable hints. I thought there was a really interesting tension in not knowing what had driven this woman to embrace violence so enthusiastically. The less we know about killers' motives, the scarier they are. Maybe that's why people spend so much time watching 24-hour news channels that cover the latest horrible domestic murder. We want to understand why people kill. Because if we can peg it on something, we can tell ourselves that they are different than us, that we aren't capable of that kind of brutality. Plus this is the launch of a series and I thought it would be fun for readers to get to learn more about Gretchen as the series continues. I just finished Sweetheart, and I promise there's a lot more Gretchen to come.

Amazon.com: As a first-time thriller author, you've got to be elated to see early reviews evoke the legendary Hannibal Lecter. Did you anticipate readers to make that connection, or are there other serial series (on paper or screen) that inspired the story of Gretchen and Sheridan?

Cain: I thought that the connection to Lecter was inevitable since Heartsick features a detective who visits a jailed serial killer. But I wasn't consciously inspired by Silence of the Lambs (or Red Dragon, which is the Harris book it more accurately echoes). I grew up in the Pacific Northwest when the Green River Killer was at large, and I was fascinated by the relationship between a cop who'd spent his career hunting a killer (as many of the cops on the Green River Task Force did) and the killer he ends up catching. I'd seen an episode of Larry King that featured two of the Green River Task Force cops and they had footage of one of the cops with Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) in jail and they were chatting like old friends. They were both trying to manipulate one another. The cop wanted Ridgway to tell him where more bodies were. Ridgway is a psychopath and wanted to feel in control. But on the surface, they seemed like buddies having a drink together at a bar. It was kind of disturbing. I wanted to explore that. Making the killer a woman was a way to make the relationship even more intense. Making her a very attractive woman upped the ante considerably.

Amazon.com: Reading Heartsick I was actually reminded of some of my favorite books by Stephen King. Like him, you have an uncanny ability to make your geographical setting feel like a character all its own. Do you think the story could have happened in any other place than Portland?

Cain: Heartsick Hawaii would definitely have been a different book. (Archie Sheridan would have been a surfer. Susan would have worked at a gift shop. And Gretchen would have been a deranged hula girl.) I live in Portland, so obviously that played into my decision to set the book here. All I had to do was look out the window. Which makes research a lot easier. But I also think that the Pacific Northwest makes a great setting for a thriller, and it's not a setting that's usually explored. Portland is so beautiful. But it's also sort of eerie. The evergreens, the coast, the mountains--the scale is so huge, and the scenery is so magnificent. But every year hikers get lost and die, kids are killed by sneaker waves on the beach, and mountain climbers get crushed by avalanches. Beauty kills. Plus it has always seemed like the Northwest is teeming with serial killers. I blame the cloud cover. And the coffee.

Amazon.com: In a lot of ways, Heartsick is more about the killer than the killings, and it's hard not to suspect that Gretchen killed only to get to Sheridan. That begs the question: is the chase always better than the catch? As a writer, is it more exciting for you to imagine the pursuit--with its tantalizing push-and-pull--than the endgame?

Cain: The most interesting aspect of the book to me is the relationship between Archie and Gretchen. Really, I wrote the whole book as an excuse to explore that. The endgame is satisfying because it's fun to see all the threads come together, but it's the relationship that keeps coming back to the computer day after day.

Amazon.com: Your characters--Susan Ward in particular--are raw, tautly wired, imperfect but still have this irresistible tenderness. It's their motives and experiences that really drive the story and ultimately elevate it way beyond what you might expect going into a serial killer tale. How did you resist falling into something more formulaic? Did you know what shape Susan and the others would take going in?

Cain: I knew I wanted flawed protagonists. I'm a sucker for a Byronic hero. Thrillers often feature such square-jawed hero types, and I wanted a story about people just barely hanging on. The psychological component is really interesting to me, and I liked that Susan's neuroses are, in their own ways, clues. In many ways, I embraced formula. I love formula--there's a reason it works. And I decided early on that I wasn't going to avoid clichés for the sake of avoiding them. Some clichés are great. My goal was not to write a literary thriller, but to take all the stuff I loved from other books and TV shows and throw them all together and then try to put my own spin on it. Heartsick is a pulpy page-turner with, I hope, a little extra effort put into the writing and the characters. Basically, I just wrote the thriller that I wanted to read.

(photo credit: Kate Eshelby)