She Stole His Spleen, Then His Heart

SWEETHEART

By Chelsea Cain

St. Martin's Minotaur. 328 pp. $24.95

It was just a year ago that "Heartsick," Chelsea Cain's gory tale of a Portland, Ore., detective's obsession with a beautiful serial killer, turned up on the bestseller lists. Now comes a sequel, "Sweetheart," in which detective Archie Sheridan still lusts for Gretchen Lowell, who police fear has slaughtered more than 200 innocent souls. The new thriller, like the original, is deep-dish bloody, more or less unputdownable and often maddening. Its plot is a jazzed-up, dumbed-down version of Thomas Harris's "The Silence of the Lambs," with Gretchen and Archie standing in for Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. You either buy the Archie-Gretchen relationship or you don't, but either way it's monumentally weird.

In the first novel, Gretchen seduced Archie, then drugged him and kept him prisoner for 10 days while she alternately chatted him up and tortured him. Among other indignities, she removed his spleen. (In the sequel, she recalls fondly, "Having my hands inside you. You were so warm and sticky. I can still smell you, your blood.") Her blood lust sated, Gretchen spared the detective's life and turned herself in. Why? The most logical explanation is that she did it to make way for this sequel. After his recovery, Archie obsessively visited Gretchen in prison. By then, he was addicted to the painkiller Vicodin, his liver was failing, and his marriage had collapsed. No matter. The boy's in love.

As "Sweetheart" opens, Gretchen is still in prison, Archie is still a mess, and a popular U.S. senator has died under mysterious circumstances. Despite his death, the novel's third important character, reporter Susan Ward, who sports turquoise hair and has attitude to burn, is determined to prove that the senator had some years earlier seduced a girl of 14. Susan's pursuit of this story allows Cain, a columnist for the Portland Oregonian, to take an irreverent look at a newsroom, with all the traditional rivalries, affairs and frustrations. My favorite line came when a detective tells Susan that "you care about stories more than people." It's a condition not unknown in the reporting game, and scoop-hungry Susan is by far the most believable character in the book.

The heart of the novel is Archie's obsession with Gretchen. Inevitably, she escapes from prison, as Hannibal Lecter did at the end of "The Silence of the Lambs," and inevitably she and Archie are reunited, as Starling and Lecter were in the sequel "Hannibal." Cain's problem, in imitating Harris's novels, is that he's a far more interesting writer than she is. The insane but sophisticated Lecter's fascination with the naive Starling possessed a certain loony logic, but the Archie-Gretchen connection makes no sense at all unless we assume he's as deranged as she is, or unless we simply accept it as an inspired premise for a slick piece of commercial fiction. Archie is a mass of contradictions ("He hated her. He loved her"), and we never learn much about Gretchen, except that she's drop-dead gorgeous (more or less literally) and delights in torturing and killing people.

I have been reading sex scenes for many, many years, hundreds of sex scenes, but I have never read one as bizarre as what occurs when Archie and Gretchen are reunited after her escape from prison. It begins with a several pages of foreplay during which she admires the heart-shaped scar she'd previously carved into his chest "like it was a Picasso." The actual act, when they get to it, is conventionally graphic and climaxes with a moment of down-and-dirty realism that Philip Roth might have written in his "Portnoy" days. "I find murder emotionally fulfilling," Gretchen confides afterward. Poor Archie realizes that he should kill this monster while he can, but he's just having too darn much fun.

For the most part, "Sweetheart" is well written, with sharp dialogue, nice descriptions and moments of offbeat humor. I particularly admired Cain's portraits of rainy Portland and of a forest fire that figures in the novel's ending. But there's some deplorable writing, too. If Cain likes a word or phrase she won't let it go. To show her scorn for a stuffy hotel, she describes its walls as an unprintable shade of yellow, then proceeds to repeat the same unpleasant term three more times. We are reminded 20 or 30 times that Susan's hair is dyed turquoise. Ditto a detective's bald/shaved/bristly noggin, endlessly referenced. In one scene, Susan notices that her cigarette "needed ashing" and so she "ashed" it and soon "ashed" another one. As a reviewer of thrillers, I can accept it when Gretchen cuts a man's heart out, slices it in half and sends the pieces to Archie's two children, or when she forces a 10-year-old to drink drain cleaner "and then skinned him with a scalpel." That goes with the serial-killer territory. But all the ashing (is that really a word?) and Susan's constant fiddling with her turquoise hair make me crazy.

Of course, my quibbles aside, Cain and her editors have given a sizable portion of the book-buying audience just what it wants in a thriller: sex, violence and cheap thrills, nicely packaged.