"Heartsick" by Chelsea Cain

Read: 4/2/09

2/5 stars

This book should have been entitled "heartburn." Because that's what I got after reading it. I picked up Heartsick for three reasons:

1. it was on sale.
2. there was a massive publicity campaign when it was coming out. (or massive enough to me who reads the ads Shelfari has).
3. it's taking me a while to get through Titus Groan after I picked it up because it took me a while to get through The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

I think the only thing I'm happy about after reading Heartsick, Chelsea Cain's first novel, is that I'm one more book closer to my initial 50-book target for the year. The book capitalizes on the the Clarice/Hannibal Lecter relationship, but doesn't do it too well.

Perhaps what seems original in Heartsick is that the heinous serial killer is a woman, Gretchen Lowell. And not just any woman--a beautiful woman, at that. Two years before the main story opens, Gretchen captures Archie Sheridan, the head of the task force meant to apprehend her, tortures him for 10 days, then lets him go and turns herself in. In the present, Archie is called back to work to help local police capture a new serial killer who's been kidnapping young girls, murdering them, bleaching them, then raping them, in that order. To complicate the plot, Archie insists that a reporter, Susan Ward, be allowed to cover the entire investigation and to get Archie's version of his story from two years prior. In the course of the story, the reader is meant to realize that Gretchen did not free Archie out of mercy and Archie was never really freed.

Let me point out a few choice words in my summary above. I said that the idea of a female serial killer seems original. But really, it seems that in a genre when almost everything has been played out, the next logical step would be to have a female version of Lecter. The other thing is that Gretchen Lowell is a far cry from Lecter. There was an effort to make Lowell seem immensely cruel and scary. However, to paraphrase a line from the book, I've seen scary, and she ain't it.

Also, I said that the reader is meant to realize certain things, because that's exactly how it felt. Shove the idea at the readers that Archie is still captivated by his captor, thereby destroying any kind of normal life he could have. Moreover, take the contrivedness to a greater extent by calling Gretchen Lowell "The Beauty Killer." You might say, "But she is beautiful, isn't she?". Yes, she is. However, investigators name their serial killers before they actually know who they are. So why did they name this unknown serial killer The Beauty Killer? Because the autopsy guy made a comment about the vandalized, mangled and tortured first body, sarcastically saying "That's a beauty." Hence, the name. It was only coincidence that the murderer really turned out to be beautiful.

If that isn't contrived, I don't know what is.

Moreover, I found the writing choppy. I like it when sentences and ideas flow into one another. Cain's writing didn't do it for me. It seemed like there wasn't much variety in structure. Finally, the ending just fell flat. Forget about the fact that you can sort of guess who the killer is. Books like that still have a saving grace if well-written or if it can get you to feel sympathy for the characters. In this book, though, the characters seem to go through a miraculous reversal. Now, I don't mind happy endings, truly I don't. But I prefer seeing a build-up towards it, instead of suspecting that the writer just wanted to end it a certain way.

I will grant, however, that Heartsick is an easy read and might have even been entertaining had I not been in a nitpicking mood. Except I always believe that if a book allows me to step back from reading it at some point in order to say "This seems a bit off," then it deserves nitpicking.