Evil at Heart
Chelsea Cain
St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-312-36848-7
320 pages; $24.99

There is a special pleasure to reading several entries in a series one right after the other. Part of it is delayed gratification: despite the arrival of a book you’ve hungered after a year ago, or even several books over the past several years, you haven’t read it/them; you’ve waited. Now you have a book or two (or three or more) all set in the same universe, and you can live there for days on end while you read all the books. At times like these, the real world fades out and you are more alive in the fictional world of the books you hold in your hands.

After reading Sweetheart (reviewed here), I immediately picked up Evil at Heart. I was hard-pressed to imagine how Chelsea Cain would keep the Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell relationship going for another book without going completely over the top. (Sweetheart was already rather uncomfortably Hannibal-ish for my taste – that is, the good guy had too much seemed to become a willing pawn of the sociopath who drives the action.)

Cain succeeds admirably in this new novel by introducing the possibility of copycat killers out there in a world that’s infatuated with the idea of Gretchen Lowell. Despite the fact that the woman is one of the most truly vicious serial killers I’ve ever come across in fiction, huge swaths of the public are delighted that she has escaped from prison. They wear tee shirts urging, “Run, Gretchen, run!” They have websites extolling her praises. And, very possibly, some of them take their anti-hero worship to the next extreme by killing in her style.

When the book opens, Archie has been a patient at the Providence Medical Center psych ward for two months, kicking his addiction to Vicodin and overcoming his suicidal tendencies. In fact, though, his addiction is long gone, his liver is recovering, and he doesn’t feel particularly suicidal any longer; but he refuses to check himself out of the hospital, insisting that he is still a danger to himself in order to prolong his stay. It’s much easier than dealing with the fact that his marriage will not be resurrected, Gretchen will not become a woman he can love and live with, and his career is verging on destruction if the full extent of his relationship with Gretchen becomes known. Archie moves himself to leave the ward for a day, though – or at least his partner, Henry Sobol, moves him – when body parts are discovered in the toilet at a Columbia River Gorge rest stop.

The discovery of eyeballs in the tank of a public toilet can sure kick-start a thriller. Archie isn’t certain that Gretchen is the killer they’re searching for, but there is no doubt that he not only wants to catch the murderer who separated those eyeballs from their owners, but also Gretchen – and this time he wants Gretchen dead.

Archie teams up this time as much with Susan Ward, a journalist who wants the crime beat at the local paper, as he does with his long-suffering partner. Susan finds herself with more scoops than she can handle, and more physical danger than she had really imagined was possible for a scribbler. Her hair is purple this time around, but that doesn’t detract from her competence. It’s been fun to watch her grow over the course of three books, and now she is truly a force to be reckoned with.

As is my habit when I write about thrillers in this space, I’ll stop short of giving you any more information for fear of spoiling all the nice traps Cain lays for her readers. I will say only that I thought this a better book than Heartsick, with a more realistic denouement. Evil at Heart is a great thriller.