Brilliant intrigue
Going back to the OG thriller: Chelsea Cain's "Heartsick"

July is one of those insouciant months in the New York publishing business. It’s appeared as long as I can remember that everyone in the publishing industry, from agents to publishers, spend most weekdays in July and August in the tony beachfront villages of Southampton.

The result of the summer exodus is a skimpy offering of compelling books and a dribble of midlist chum for catching somebody at an airport with a three-hour wait.

“The Good Liar,” by the always-inscrutable Denise Mina, is up this month, but again, and with all of her books I’ve done my best to read, I’ve lost the thread more than a few times. And the wonderful Jurica Pavičić of Croatia, with a June release of “Red Water,” was too dense for a summer read, and I abandoned what I’m sure is a notable novel on page seventy-one. Then Sergio Olguín, of Buenos Aires, with his stunning “The Fragility of Bodies” and “The Foreign Girls,” both reviewed here, became confusing with his March 2025 release of “The Best Enemy.” I put this one down with frustration and a pledge to go back to it.

So in my despair, I went back to reread the stunning crime fiction that began my investigation of the genre. You probably haven’t heard of Chelsea Cain who wrote “Heartsick,” her 2007 debut novel. It is the first in a quintet of books that must be read sequentially, about Portland, Ore., senior detective Archie Sheridan and his nemesis Gretchen Lowell, without doubt the savviest and most evil and seductive villainess in crime fiction history. You will have long forgotten the luminous Lizabeth Salandar in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy before you forget a scintilla of Gretchen Lowell.  

Cain’s last book in the Gretchen Lowell series is “Kill You Twice,” released in August 2012. If you read “Heartsick,” you will read all of Cain’s Gretchen Lowell thrillers – you’ll steal them if you have to – but you must read “Heartsick” first.

It’s macabre. It’s mesmerizing. It’s brilliant. Nobody can do heinous and make you like it as Cain does, and I don’t like abhorrent. Her five books have sold an excess of 1 million in the United States alone, and every Cain mystery of those first five has made the New York Times best-seller list.

Gretchen Lowell is a figurine beauty: blond, chiseled, slinky – a femme fatale. She insinuates herself into Portland’s serious crimes unit headed by veteran detective Archie Sheridan. He has been impotently investigating a deviant serial killer with a team of detectives for the past 10 years.  

Gretchen is clueful in addition to being seductive. Her bright green eyes, her poise and stunning beauty, and that sensual touch of naiveté force a captivation seldom experienced among the hardbitten, always doubtful detective. Gretchen falsifies perfectly and unquestioned: an academic psychologist having just finished a book, thought she might help profile the psychopath …  just wants to help … has followed the case with keen interest and wants to lend a new perspective. 

Archie has been haunted by his team’s failure to find what will soon come to be known as the Beauty Killer. He’s desperate for a clue. A fetching psychologist in between books and professorships, why not? Archie is soon working closely with Gretchen – closer than a mouse in the claws of a playful feline.

In “Heartsick,” Cain personifies fiction’s most perfectly villainous murderer. Women don’t usually play this role, but Gretchen is like no woman you’ve ever met in dreams or fiction. She’s beautiful, lovable and bewitching, and she enslaves Archie.

Flash ahead to Archie’s return to work after two years of convalescing, still shaken and damaged from his 10-day ordeal with Gretchen, popping pain pills and amphetamines and leading his team of detectives in yet another serial killer investigation with eerie similarities. 

Now Archie visits Gretchen every Sunday in the state prison, compelled, in theory, because at every visit she gives up the location of another of her victims. But we know Archie is obsessed with his torturer, dreams about her, desires her, is willing to again be her captive.

“Heartsick” is peopled with carefully drawn and charismatic supporting characters who keep in motion components of a brilliantly fashioned intrigue. All of Cain’s first five books are not for dozy readers. You will have to order first “Heartsick” then the other Cain books from Maria’s Bookshop. You might try Durango Public Library first; Cain’s books most probably are out of print, but with the Gretchen Lowell character, the digging is worth the trouble.