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wizardmacdonald's review against another edition
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
whaney's review
3.0
Interesting listen. A lot of things are left unsaid so you keep wondering what is really going on in Archie's head. Why did he choose Susan? What's really going on with Gretchen? Even at the end of the book there seems way more to the story that wasn't told. So, I'll be looking for the next one.
elinacre's review
4.0
dark, psychologically twisted characters. well-written, suspenseful plot. can't wait to read more in this series!
denaiir's review
5.0
4.5 stars
This was such a good thriller, exactly what I am looking for: sick, twisted, full of serial-killers and damaged cops. My favorite style!
The audiobook was not very good so it dampened my enjoyment a little bit, which is why I didn't give it 5 stars, but it was still riveting and I can't wait to get more of Gretchen Lowell!
This was such a good thriller, exactly what I am looking for: sick, twisted, full of serial-killers and damaged cops. My favorite style!
The audiobook was not very good so it dampened my enjoyment a little bit, which is why I didn't give it 5 stars, but it was still riveting and I can't wait to get more of Gretchen Lowell!
thegeekyblogger's review
4.0
Read for #BoutofBooks and #BookClub (bought for myself)
Overall Rating: 4.00
Story Rating: 3.75
Character Rating: 4.25 (Especially the sicko Gretchen)
First thought when finished: I am sufficiently creeped out in a Hannibal Lector kind of way!
What I thought of the Case: Heartsick has two cases: One that has already completed and one that is currently happening. It is an interesting way to tell a tale but I think it really works. We meet Gretchen Lowell "psycho supreme" who kidnapped, tortured, and then released our main lead. Female serial killers are pretty darn scary and Gretchen is probably one of the scariest. She made my skin crawl at times. The parts of the story that contain her are often uncomfortable but they work so well. The current case I wasn't as invested in BUT I did feel it had a nice twist towards about the 3/4 mark. I felt it played out pretty predictably but the writing was solid!
What I thought of the Characters: I loved (maybe that isn't the right word) Gretchen Lowell. She was so well written! I also really liked how broken Archie was written. I think he truly showed some remarkable amounts of "clarity" despite all his other issues. In fact, I think what Gretchen says to him is true--he has all the markers to be a serial killer but I think he will use his cat/mouse abilities for the greater good. I liked Susan and hope that she is in the future books. I think she has some great potential to be useful to Archie. Overall, this is a great character driven thriller!
Final Thought: Heartsick is a great thriller that I don't recommend reading at night!
Overall Rating: 4.00
Story Rating: 3.75
Character Rating: 4.25 (Especially the sicko Gretchen)
First thought when finished: I am sufficiently creeped out in a Hannibal Lector kind of way!
What I thought of the Case: Heartsick has two cases: One that has already completed and one that is currently happening. It is an interesting way to tell a tale but I think it really works. We meet Gretchen Lowell "psycho supreme" who kidnapped, tortured, and then released our main lead. Female serial killers are pretty darn scary and Gretchen is probably one of the scariest. She made my skin crawl at times. The parts of the story that contain her are often uncomfortable but they work so well. The current case I wasn't as invested in BUT I did feel it had a nice twist towards about the 3/4 mark. I felt it played out pretty predictably but the writing was solid!
What I thought of the Characters: I loved (maybe that isn't the right word) Gretchen Lowell. She was so well written! I also really liked how broken Archie was written. I think he truly showed some remarkable amounts of "clarity" despite all his other issues. In fact, I think what Gretchen says to him is true--he has all the markers to be a serial killer but I think he will use his cat/mouse abilities for the greater good. I liked Susan and hope that she is in the future books. I think she has some great potential to be useful to Archie. Overall, this is a great character driven thriller!
Final Thought: Heartsick is a great thriller that I don't recommend reading at night!
jnt7w2's review
4.0
Great twist though it felt like the main plot was just background noise to the emotional drama of the main character not sure if that is good or bad writing.
rchll's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
This book was completely different than what I was expecting - at the same time though, I was all the more impressed by it and am weirdly glad it went in the direction it did (at least for book 1 - I'm weak and had to spoil some future plot points for other books in this series which I'll briefly touch on in my review so be warned!!).
As a dark romance/erotic horror girlie, I totally thought this was going to be a cop/serial killer 'romance' thats incredibly messed up and toxic but you can't help but simultaneously dread and desire their progression?? Instead, my very generalized one sentence impression is that this is a story about a weak man whose life is irrevocably f*cked up, and I couldn't help but see it as all the more tragic because of his role in his downfall. Has he been horribly tortured and is he a victim in some ways? Absolutely - but theres more to it than that.
(Spoilers for future books ahead) Upon finding out that its revealed in book 2 that Archie and Gretchen had begun an affair before he found out she was the Beauty Killer/his torture at her hands, it completely changed my perception of him. While I saw him at first as this terribly traumatized man with a severe case of Stockholm syndrome where Gretchen is concerned, I now see him as also complicit in his role in a way - much like the other nameless men Gretchen seduces and manipulates for her purposes. Not to oversimplify lol but Archie loses Debbie, someone who truly loves and knows him, not to mention his children, prior happy life, for the attention of someone who strokes his ego. Its gut-wrenching and as wonderful a writer as Chelsea Cain is, I really can't continue to read about a character like Archie knowing he is the main protagonist and he's going to get a semblance of a happy ending at the expense of those who deserve a real one. I'm talking here about Susan because she deserves so much more than that - Debbie I know is basically like "I'm done with you," and means it, but Susan is absolutely sucked into Archie's life, and after everything she's been through???
So basically, despite my enjoyment of this book I probably won't be continuing the series. Susan, Gretchen, Debbie and the majority of characters other than Archie are all so interesting to read about - they're so incredibly complex and layered, even the ones with limited page time. Archie on the other hand, is by no means 1D, and if he was a side character, it would have worked for me. However as a main character, the phrase "he's literally just a guy!!" comes to mind and I can't help but just be uninterested in his journey.
bellisk's review
3.0
I can't quite remember why I bought this book, but I spent all of today ill in bed and thought it would be an entertaining, non-challenging read in between naps. My copy has a quote from the Daily Fail on the front cover and the most platonically trashy design I've ever seen. This kind of thriller is not my usual choice, but I do love crime fiction and was willing to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
All the marketing and reviews of Heartsick that I read before buying it emphasise the character of Gretchen Lowell, the 'Beauty Killer' who was locked up for life two years before the story starts, after torturing Detective Archie Sheridan to death, reviving him and turning herself in. Lowell was played up as a new kind of fictional serial killer: seductive, enigmatic, irresistably (to the reader) sadistic, a full match for Hannibal Lector. She retains an influence over Archie by making him visit her weekly, telling details of her other murders only to him. This type of creation can easily become pantomimish, but Cain makes the sensible decision to minimise the page count for which Lowell is actually present. Instead she focusses on Archie and the reporter following him for a feature, Susan Ward, who are much more interesting as characters. As another reporter says, "Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. ... She doesn't do things for reasons," and this book is all about the reasons why people do what they do, and the ways they are marked by others in their pasts, years down the line.
This may be a conventional theme for a psychological thriller, and the twist of the killer's identity was too neat for me, but I felt the characterisation really made the novel work. Susan Ward was particularly well-drawn, almost uncomfortably so for me. She is a twenty-eight-year-old woman who dyes her hair pink, wears band t-shirts and sneakers, "always [feels] a little uneasy around women who [are] more sophisticated than she [is]" and harbours a heap of issues from her teenage years. At least they aren't the same issues as mine (and at least I've never tried to fix mine by sleeping with my boss). I was ready to get angry at Cain for drawing a character so like me and then slapping the lazy tag of 'daddy issues' on her, but instead Susan was written believably and comes across as an interesting, intelligent person. Archie's role, meanwhile, is as the classic Tortured Cop, but I felt the exploration of his Stockholm Syndrome and pill addiction was paced well and mostly avoided cliché. Cain's writing captures physical sensations and movements almost gracefully, making her characters feel embodied without the simplistic descriptions I've failed to enjoy in other such thrillers. Her prose is not sophisticated but it is sympathetic and well-observed, and nearly all of the characters seem to have their own inner lives, whether or not these are drawn out in the story.
One slightly difficult aspect of this was the character of Anne Boyd, the FBI profiler. I found her engaging and enjoyed her friendship with Claire Masland and with Archie, and her motivation made sense: having completely mischaracterised the Beauty Killer, because Lowell had read up on profiling and psychiatry and changed her behaviour accordingly, Anne is driven to help solve the After School Strangler case as quickly as possible. This plot thread was hard for me to reconcile with the knowledge that profiling is bunk. If Anne's predictions had been eerily accurate and directly led to the killer's capture, I would have had to recategorise Heartsick as SFF with a crime slant to it, something I don't like being surprised about (see my review of the much poorer novel, [b:Darkly Dreaming Dexter|17231|Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter, #1)|Jeff Lindsay|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1334404607s/17231.jpg|2113743]). As it turns out, Anne does make some correct predictions about the killer, but they are unimpressive and not instrumental. She seems to function mostly to allow dialogue with other characters about the developments of the plot.
The theme of a person's being shaped by their past experiences plays out in a number of ways through the novel, but comes to a head at the end. Susan's high-school teacher and ex-lover, the murderer, tells her "that we all have people in the world we belong to. Connect with. And that I was his." Equally, Lowell lays claim to Archie, boasting that neither his wife nor Susan can ever be with him, "Because I've ruined him for other women." Both Susan and Archie, however, end the novel by shaking off this ownership. Archie even turns it around by agreeing that Lowell is a psychopath, "[b]ut she's my psychopath." He then finally uses his own power to leave her in prison and resolves not to go back to her. Susan decides to stop sleeping with her married boss and also stands up to him regarding a story he didn't want her to cover, but she is determined to.
I noticed some interesting contrasts between this book and the Millenium series by [a:Stieg Larsson|706255|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1246466225p2/706255.jpg]. Heartsick is book one of a series, but I am not interested in reading further books based on these characters. In my opinion, their most important psychological developments have been made, and to come back to Lowell, Archie and especially Susan would be to risk dragging out and repeating the successes of this book in an unsatisfying way. After finishing [b:The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest|6892870|The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium, #3)|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327708260s/6892870.jpg|12883496], however, I was struck by sadness that the books that were planned to come after it would never be written. I felt that, now Salander's mysterious background had been drawn out and her relationship with Blomqvist established, the way was clear for them to have many more unrelated adventures together. I wanted to see Salander and Blomqvist crusading together against the oppression of women. Perhaps Susan and Archie just didn't have the same chemistry between them. On the other hand, I cannot express how grateful I am that Cain didn't have them sleep together. This is probably the biggest tell that Heartsick was written by a woman, rather than a man writing an obvious self-insert character. Susan's feelings for Archie are explicitly pointed out as part of her attraction to father figures, and for them to have had sex would have cheapened the narrative and ruined my respect for Cain's careful characterisation.
Heartsick is a gory book. Cain describes the schoolgirl victims of the newest serial killer, and Lowell's dissections of her living victims, unflinchingly and has clearly done a lot of research into the relevant forensic and medical science. These scenes interleave with Susan's doubts about whether she is exploiting the dead girls in her reporting, and the same question must have occurred to Cain. The violence here bothered me a lot less than in [b:The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo|2429135|The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1)|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327868566s/2429135.jpg|1708725], which I nearly threw across the room when I got to the mention of the the canary. (It was on my Kindle, so I didn't.) This was because TGWTDT deliberately ties its story into a wider context of violence against women, including statistics on sexual harrassment and domestic abuse beneath its chapter headings, but the sensational crimes it describes are so unreal, so obviously the plot of a thriller novel, that they detracted from this ostensibly realist political goal. Although Heartsick is set in the present-day USA, and the sexual manipulation of underage girls is a theme, the book doesn't set out to make a statement in such an overt way. The After School Strangler's crimes are muted compared to those in TGWTDT and Lowell's inventive sadism is directed towards the "male, female, young, old." Lowell resists a political interpretation of her work just as strongly as she resists psychological analysis: "I'm not the way I am because of [my father]. I'm not a violent person." This is what makes her truly a creature of fantasy and allows Heartsick to remain escapism.
In summary, Heartsick is an enjoyable book for those, like me, who prefer their light reading to contain troubled but basically good protagonists; evocations of far-off cities written by the locals; knotty mysteries and the extraction of internal organs.
All the marketing and reviews of Heartsick that I read before buying it emphasise the character of Gretchen Lowell, the 'Beauty Killer' who was locked up for life two years before the story starts, after torturing Detective Archie Sheridan to death, reviving him and turning herself in. Lowell was played up as a new kind of fictional serial killer: seductive, enigmatic, irresistably (to the reader) sadistic, a full match for Hannibal Lector. She retains an influence over Archie by making him visit her weekly, telling details of her other murders only to him. This type of creation can easily become pantomimish, but Cain makes the sensible decision to minimise the page count for which Lowell is actually present. Instead she focusses on Archie and the reporter following him for a feature, Susan Ward, who are much more interesting as characters. As another reporter says, "Gretchen Lowell is a psychopath. ... She doesn't do things for reasons," and this book is all about the reasons why people do what they do, and the ways they are marked by others in their pasts, years down the line.
This may be a conventional theme for a psychological thriller, and the twist of the killer's identity was too neat for me, but I felt the characterisation really made the novel work. Susan Ward was particularly well-drawn, almost uncomfortably so for me. She is a twenty-eight-year-old woman who dyes her hair pink, wears band t-shirts and sneakers, "always [feels] a little uneasy around women who [are] more sophisticated than she [is]" and harbours a heap of issues from her teenage years. At least they aren't the same issues as mine (and at least I've never tried to fix mine by sleeping with my boss). I was ready to get angry at Cain for drawing a character so like me and then slapping the lazy tag of 'daddy issues' on her, but instead Susan was written believably and comes across as an interesting, intelligent person. Archie's role, meanwhile, is as the classic Tortured Cop, but I felt the exploration of his Stockholm Syndrome and pill addiction was paced well and mostly avoided cliché. Cain's writing captures physical sensations and movements almost gracefully, making her characters feel embodied without the simplistic descriptions I've failed to enjoy in other such thrillers. Her prose is not sophisticated but it is sympathetic and well-observed, and nearly all of the characters seem to have their own inner lives, whether or not these are drawn out in the story.
One slightly difficult aspect of this was the character of Anne Boyd, the FBI profiler. I found her engaging and enjoyed her friendship with Claire Masland and with Archie, and her motivation made sense: having completely mischaracterised the Beauty Killer, because Lowell had read up on profiling and psychiatry and changed her behaviour accordingly, Anne is driven to help solve the After School Strangler case as quickly as possible. This plot thread was hard for me to reconcile with the knowledge that profiling is bunk. If Anne's predictions had been eerily accurate and directly led to the killer's capture, I would have had to recategorise Heartsick as SFF with a crime slant to it, something I don't like being surprised about (see my review of the much poorer novel, [b:Darkly Dreaming Dexter|17231|Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter, #1)|Jeff Lindsay|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1334404607s/17231.jpg|2113743]). As it turns out, Anne does make some correct predictions about the killer, but they are unimpressive and not instrumental. She seems to function mostly to allow dialogue with other characters about the developments of the plot.
The theme of a person's being shaped by their past experiences plays out in a number of ways through the novel, but comes to a head at the end. Susan's high-school teacher and ex-lover, the murderer, tells her "that we all have people in the world we belong to. Connect with. And that I was his." Equally, Lowell lays claim to Archie, boasting that neither his wife nor Susan can ever be with him, "Because I've ruined him for other women." Both Susan and Archie, however, end the novel by shaking off this ownership. Archie even turns it around by agreeing that Lowell is a psychopath, "[b]ut she's my psychopath." He then finally uses his own power to leave her in prison and resolves not to go back to her. Susan decides to stop sleeping with her married boss and also stands up to him regarding a story he didn't want her to cover, but she is determined to.
I noticed some interesting contrasts between this book and the Millenium series by [a:Stieg Larsson|706255|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1246466225p2/706255.jpg]. Heartsick is book one of a series, but I am not interested in reading further books based on these characters. In my opinion, their most important psychological developments have been made, and to come back to Lowell, Archie and especially Susan would be to risk dragging out and repeating the successes of this book in an unsatisfying way. After finishing [b:The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest|6892870|The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium, #3)|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327708260s/6892870.jpg|12883496], however, I was struck by sadness that the books that were planned to come after it would never be written. I felt that, now Salander's mysterious background had been drawn out and her relationship with Blomqvist established, the way was clear for them to have many more unrelated adventures together. I wanted to see Salander and Blomqvist crusading together against the oppression of women. Perhaps Susan and Archie just didn't have the same chemistry between them. On the other hand, I cannot express how grateful I am that Cain didn't have them sleep together. This is probably the biggest tell that Heartsick was written by a woman, rather than a man writing an obvious self-insert character. Susan's feelings for Archie are explicitly pointed out as part of her attraction to father figures, and for them to have had sex would have cheapened the narrative and ruined my respect for Cain's careful characterisation.
Heartsick is a gory book. Cain describes the schoolgirl victims of the newest serial killer, and Lowell's dissections of her living victims, unflinchingly and has clearly done a lot of research into the relevant forensic and medical science. These scenes interleave with Susan's doubts about whether she is exploiting the dead girls in her reporting, and the same question must have occurred to Cain. The violence here bothered me a lot less than in [b:The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo|2429135|The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1)|Stieg Larsson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327868566s/2429135.jpg|1708725], which I nearly threw across the room when I got to the mention of the the canary. (It was on my Kindle, so I didn't.) This was because TGWTDT deliberately ties its story into a wider context of violence against women, including statistics on sexual harrassment and domestic abuse beneath its chapter headings, but the sensational crimes it describes are so unreal, so obviously the plot of a thriller novel, that they detracted from this ostensibly realist political goal. Although Heartsick is set in the present-day USA, and the sexual manipulation of underage girls is a theme, the book doesn't set out to make a statement in such an overt way. The After School Strangler's crimes are muted compared to those in TGWTDT and Lowell's inventive sadism is directed towards the "male, female, young, old." Lowell resists a political interpretation of her work just as strongly as she resists psychological analysis: "I'm not the way I am because of [my father]. I'm not a violent person." This is what makes her truly a creature of fantasy and allows Heartsick to remain escapism.
In summary, Heartsick is an enjoyable book for those, like me, who prefer their light reading to contain troubled but basically good protagonists; evocations of far-off cities written by the locals; knotty mysteries and the extraction of internal organs.