SWEETHEART
Chelsea Cain
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Thriller
ISBN: 9780312368470
If you haven’t read HEARTSICK, Chelsea Cain’s debut novel, please stop what you’re doing, buy that wonderful book, crack open the spine and come back when you finish. You’ll be a little blurry-eyed and surprised by the speed with which you turn those pages, but you won’t be gone for long.
SWEETHEART, a title that is by turns appropriate and oh-so-totally wrong, is a perfect meld of jagged edges. It contains the salt of The Silence of the Lambs, the pepper of Basic Instinct and the garlic of Fatal Attraction. But the red meat (and there’s plenty of it) is all Cain’s own. The meat is not so much a bizarre triangle as it is a rectangle --- or, to put it more accurately, a box. The corners --- Portland, Oregon detective Archie Sheridan, his ex-wife, Debbie, reporter Susan Ward and serial killer Gretchen Lowell --- are so sharp that everyone will get cut before it’s all over.
SWEETHEART begins a few miles down the road from where HEARTSICK left off. Lowell is in prison, permitting herself to be captured in order to save Sheridan’s life. He and his ex-wife are living together, though their house is a wide harbor where they pass each other with wide berth. Ward, still nursing unrequited feelings for Sheridan, has moved in with her mother, a flaky hippy-dippy who is a realistic, believable caricature of herself. The discovery of a trio of bodily remains on a hillside, uncomfortably close to where one of Lowell’s victims was initially spotted, sends Sheridan reeling on a trajectory toward Lowell once again.
Sheridan, by the way, is a mess. Addicted to Vicodin (partially as the result of the wounds that Lowell inflicted upon him), he is struggling in a big way, medicating the pain caused by the medication he is taking for the pain. When Lowell escapes during a prison transfer, his obsession for her takes on its own addictive qualities. Lowell, however, is also addicted to Sheridan in her own way, with similar jeopardy attaching to her. Physically and mentally on a downward spiral, Sheridan concocts a plot designed to capture, and perhaps eliminate, Lowell but at the ultimate personal cost.
As the climax is played out in a remote Oregon wilderness against the backdrop of a roaring forest fire, Lowell and Sheridan do a deadly dance even as Ward races to Sheridan’s rescue --- an act that may actually put him, and Ward, in greater danger.
Chelsea Cain is a marvel. A journalist herself, she infuses SWEETHEART with equal parts violence, erotica and mystery to create another winner that matches the quality of its predecessor. For all of its incredible plotting and pitch-perfect narrative, however, the heart of the book is its characterization. You walk away not only understanding Sheridan’s obsession with Lowell, but also feeling just a bit of that obsession yourself.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
