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A review by bellisk
Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
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.