Prisoner of love

by Jeffrey Mannix

August book releases are scant right now, with publishers poised to put out their best bets this fall, when readers should be spending more time indoors reading. Or at least are no longer enamored with what’s sneeringly called “beach reads.”

So instead of picking up one of those 500-page formulaic soap operas, I’m introducing you to an author who wrote six of the most splendidly wanton murder mysteries that she eventually gave up writing crime altogether. She frightened even herself, sounds like. But, if you have tough skin, “Heartsick,” by Chelsea Cain, will give you lifetime credentials for a window seat on the crime fiction train to intransigence. 

Cain’s “Heartsick” is her 2007 debut novel, and the first in a quintet of books that must be read sequentially, about Portland, Ore., detective Archie Sheridan and his nemesis Gretchen Lowell. The latter is certainly the savviest, most evil and seductive villainess in crime fiction history. You will have long forgotten the luminous Lizabeth Salendar in Stieg Larssen’s Millennium Trilogy before you forget a scintilla of Gretchen Lowell.  

Cain’s latest in the Gretchen Lowell series, “Let Me Go,” was released in August 2013. If you read “Heartsick,” you will read all of Cain’s 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 I’ve ever read can do heinous and make you like it as Cain can. Her six books have sold in excess of 1 million in the United States alone, and every Cain mystery has made the New York Times bestseller list.

Gretchen Lowell is a figurine beauty: blond, chiseled, slinky – a femme fatale. She insinuates herself into Portland police’s serious crimes unit. It’s headed by veteran detective Archie Sheridan, who’s been fruitlessly 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 with her polished natural charm forces compliance. She lies with unquestioned authority: an academic psychologist, having just finished a book, thought she might help profile the psychopath …  just wants to help … has followed the case and Sheridan with keen interest… 

Sheridan has been haunted with a voice only he can hear by his failure to find a shred of evidence in pursuit for nearly half his career of the Beauty Killer. He’s desperate for a clue. A fetching psychologist in-between books and professorships, why not? Gretchen’s on the team, working closely with Archie – soon closer than a mouse in the claws of a playful feline.

In “Heartsick,”  Cain invents fiction’s most perfectly villainous murderer. Women don’t usually play this role, don’t usually kill for pleasure, don’t usually torture with glee. But Gretchen Lowell is like no woman you’ve ever met in dreams or fiction – and she’s lovable.

Cain skillfully juxtaposes present and past events to concoct police procedure with evil. It begins on page one with a flashback to Sheridan’s bizarre entrapment and impassioned torture. 

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

Now the damaged and lovelorn Sheridan visits Gretchen every Sunday in the state prison for the criminally insane, compelled, in theory, because at every visit she gives up the location of another of her victims. But we know that Sheridan 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. A smart book not for dozy readers.

If you’re brave enough to take Cain and “Heartsick” on, you’ll have to special order it from Maria’s Bookshop. And if you have a murmur of a faint heart, the Durango Public Library has a single copy with nobody waiting.