Thursday, November 11, 2010

Cain, Chelsea: Heartsick

A serial killer novel with a difference and a less usual location. Set in Portland, Oregon, the novel deals with the police search for a killer of teenage schoolgirls with the task force being led by a detective who had captured a different serial killer two years earlier - or rather, had been captured by the killer and tortured almost to death before she chose to give herself up.
This has given him some degree of celebrity and he has agreed to be the subject of an extended profile written by a woman
reporter in her twenties. The present-day search is interspersed in the book with details of his capture and torture. He also
visits his captor every Sunday in part to learn details of other killings (he was the 200th victim apparently). The story moves along easily even with a number of apparently irrelevant digressions though it is not that well written (as is the case with many such novels). An interesting twist at the denouement which is just about believable. I won't go out of my way to find
anything else by this author but would read her again.

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