 |
 |
Sign in/joinLanguage: English [ others ]
Over forty million books on members' bookshelves.
|
Loading... Heartsickby Chelsea Cain
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. TerryWeyna | Jun 11, 2009 |   Excellent thriller. The style of the book very much reminded me of the style of Thomas Harris. Ms. Cain grips the reader from the beginning and makes Archie Sheridan a character that I want to know more about. I can't wait to read the sequel. (  )knitterbug1023 | May 6, 2009 | A dark, twisted, gory thriller that was right up my alley. I read this book and the sequel Sweetheart in a two day period, I was that captivated. I think I made some co-workers a little nervous when I described what I was reading, but hey they asked. Great story of a Portland, pill popping detective who has been tortured and brought back from death by his tormentor, who he just happens to be obsessed with and perhaps a little in love with the beautiful serial killer Gretchen. (  )jonesli | Apr 1, 2009 | Thriller. First novel in the series about Archie, a police detective, and Gretchen, a totally uncompromising female serial killer. In this book, Archie has recovered from nearly dying at the hands of Gretchen. He is encouraged to head another serial killer task force in order to bring him back to normalcy. This new serial killer is targeting young high school girls in order to rape and murder them. Archie is still haunted by his experiences with Gretchen. In flashbacks, the reader is shown what was done to Archie - from his perspective - and I'll always look at cleaning products differently. Gretchen is in jail now, but has managed to manipulate Archie into visiting her on a regular basis. This both hampers and helps his recovery. Chelsea Cain's strength is the ability to fill each page with dread and gruesome horror. She's colourfully graphic and she doesn't hold back about describing blood and pain. I like how Cain can have so many scenes with Gretchen, yet keep her character, her thoughts, her emotions so completely fathomless. (  )Cauterize | Mar 29, 2009 | Detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years heading the task force of detectives that tracked the Beauty Killer, a twisted serial killer who tortured her victims within an inch of their life before killing them. Archie is tricked and captured by Gretchen Lowell, the serial killer he had been tracking. After spending days as the subject of her horrific abuse, Archie is on his death bed and is subsequently saved by the woman who killed him. Gretchen saved Archie's life by giving herself up and calling in the police for help. Two years have passed since Gretchen's apprehension and Archie is still a mess due to the torture he suffered at her hands. He's addicted to prescription pain medication, has left his wife and kids and is in regular contact with Gretchen Lowell. It is safe to say that Archie is a headcase. Now, with a new serial killer stalking the streets of Portland, Oregon, preying on teenage girls, Archie has been called off his extended medical leave to head the task force for the After School Strangler. Acting as Archie's shadow on his first case since Gretchen Lowell, is journalist Susan Ward, who was hand picked by Archie to be the sole inside reporter on the case. Susan, a sassy young journalist with bright pink hair and a string of issues almost as long as Archie's, is pulled from a story she's been secretly working on to follow Archie, a big deal for any Portland journalist. Susan takes advantage of the opportunity to work alongside the infamous Archie Sheridan. She dives into the case, green as a newborn, but Susan is capable and tough. In other words, she has the makings of good journalist. Together, Archie and Susan embark on a case that not only tests their mettle for their respective careers, but opens up past demons that both want to remain buried. HeartSick is told from a few different point of views. Switching from Archie's third person to alternating chapters of his captivity told in third person present. Susan and Anne, a criminal profiler working on the case, also have a third person point of view. Susan was an interesting character, she's both capable and self destructive. Her father died when she was at a pivotal point in her life and Susan has found a way to act out ever since. Part of this acting out shows in her compulsive need to sleep with married or complicated men. Anne is working on the After School Strangler case almost as a way of making up for her faulty profiling in the Beauty Killer case. She had Gretchen pegged as a man from the start and feels that her mess up is what caused Archie to be taken by Gretchen in the first place. While there were a few different threads going in this story, by far, the most notable of them was the twisted relationship between Archie and Gretchen. It was at once intriguing and repelling. Reading about them was the equivalent to watching a train wreck: I wanted to look away but the twisted, macabre of it all kept my eyes glued to the oncoming disaster. It is obvious that Archie is suffering from some form of Post Traumatic Stress syndrome, and as Gretchen so aptly points out: Stockholm Syndrome, and probably a few other syndromes. He's a functioning junkie and only finds true solace in Gretchen, the woman who pretty much killed the man he once was. Gretchen is smart, and continues to be able to manipulate Archie from behind bars. She plays her hand wisely, giving Archie just enough information on her past unsolved killings to keep Archie coming back to her. But Gretchen lacks the appeal that made her predecessors, like Hannibal Lecter, immensely likeable in their craziness. At the end of Silence of the Lambs one was torn as to whether they should root for Hannibal or Clarice, at the end of HeartSick, I wanted Gretchen dead and for Archie to be the one to kill her. Though Archie was the books saving grace - his struggle with right and wrong, and the man he was vs the man he'd become made him the most compelling character - there were points where I wanted him to suck it up and show Gretchen who was boss. He did sort of, but I have a feeling that it won't last for long. If I could sum up HeartSick in one word, it would be 'interesting.' I found all of the working threads to be just that, but even though my interest was held, the story lacked the punch that I was waiting/hoping for. The After School serial killer case was a bit predictable, and I felt it drug along in places. There was, at times, too much description and then at other times, too little. The eventual tie up of the mystery was unremarkable and most of the characters were blah. But even with all these things working against the story, I found it very readable, and finished the book in two sittings. Then, upon closing the it, I was ready to read the sequel. So HeartSick had that certain something that worked for me, even though I had problems with it. That said, I do plan on continuing with the followup Sweetheart. I'm interested in seeing where the story that Susan was working on prior to being assigned to Archie, goes. I also hope to see Archie with a stronger backbone where Gretchen is concerned, and I wouldn't mind seeing Gretchen fry. Archie was bordering a little too close to sad sack in this book and sad sack's are not that interesting to read about. And Gretchen was a little too ingenious, too perfect, too unreal for me to feel anything for her other than dislike. ( )cupid | Feb 3, 2009 | 0.064 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0312368461, Hardcover)Chelsea Cain steps into a crowded, blood-soaked genre with Heartsick, a riveting, character-driven novel about a damaged cop and his obsession with the serial killer who...let him live. Gretchen Lowell tortured Detective Archie Sheridan for ten days, then inexplicably let him go and turned herself in. Cain turns the (nearly played out) Starling/Lecter relationship on its ear: Sheridan must face down his would-be killer to help hunt down another. What sets this disturbing novel apart from the rest is its bruised, haunted heart in the form of Detective Sheridan, a bewildered survivor trying to catch a killer and save himself. --Daphne DurhamQuestions 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? 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)(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. 
Until now. Chelsea Cain is one clever lady. Even though the right answer is obvious in retrospect -- as it should be in any mystery that plays fair -- the solution eluded me with its many red herrings. This solid first effort, though clumsily written in spots, reveals an extremely promising talent, and I'm hoping we'll be hearing a lot more from Ms. Cain.
Her tale involves the ghastliest criminal since Thomas Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs, a woman named Gretchen Lowell, who claims to be responsible for at least 200 deaths. She is now safely locked up, but she still manages to control Portland Detective Archie Sheridan, who was in charge of the investigation to capture her for ten long years. Just before she was caught -- she actually turned herself in -- she spent many long days leisurely torturing Sheridan both mentally and physically, until he became hers in heart, mind and body. He still visits her every Sunday, ostensibly to get from her the names and locations of her kills, but really because he can't help himself; he must see her.
Now a new serial murderer is loose in Portland, taking young teenage girls, killing and raping them. The old task force formed to catch Gretchen is reunited to catch this new murderer as quickly as possible, before the body count mounts. Sheridan's work is either complicated or helped (it isn't entirely clear which) by the constant shadow of Susan Ward, a young newspaper reporter who hopes to earn a Pulitzer with a series of articles about him. Ward is simultaneously likeable and unlikeable, an apparent case of arrested development who still favors torn jeans and pink hair despite her unquestioned talent as a mature writer. Her involvement with Sheridan becomes more complicated than either of them expected, and one soon begins to wonder who needs who the most.
Heartsick suffers from a number of the problems one expects in first mysteries: a few characters who are too obviously stereotypes, like the mayor who can't wait to give the press conference announcing the identity of the murderer, or the partner who does things against his better judgment because he trusts and is protective of Sheridan. But Gretchen Lowell is a wonderful invention, on a par with but not derivative of Hannibal Lecter. I want to know more about what makes this woman tick. I hope that Cain has more books planned around her horrific misdeeds, because I can't wait to read them.