EVIL AT HEART, The Courier Journal

Author Chelsea Cain wields her sharp prose with a calculated cool that would make her great creation beam with pride...This is a terrific book...It's horrid, and anything but horrible.

Gretchen Lowell — twisted serial killer extraordinaire and star of two previous thrillers — is back with a vengeance in this dark and disturbing continuation of the series. Author Chelsea Cain wields her sharp prose with a calculated cool that would make her great creation beam with pride; that the author has created a second iconic character in the same series is all the more remarkable.

Archie Sheridan — the hunter and the haunted — has spent two months voluntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment of the mental and physical scars he suffered at the hands of Gretchen in the first two books. The shocking twist from book two is further explored throughout these pages, adding more depth and heft to the narrative than one would expect from a page-turner. Archie and everyone in the novel know that as long as Gretchen is loose no one is safe, and they soon discover that safety doesn't even extend within the walls of the hospital.

Bodies — or at least parts of them — begin to turn up bearing signatures from Gretchen's killing spree. Has she resumed her evil ways, or is there a copycat afoot? Both seem likely, as Gretchen has become a media darling in our sound bite culture, her beauty belying her true evil. The public clamors for more news, and the media dutifully provide it, until Gretchen becomes an enormous anti-heroine that people love to hate for entertainment (and some love her for their own twisted reasons).

Susan Ward continues to cover the story for the paper, but her concern for her friend Archie and her nose for a great story pull her deeper and deeper into the case. In fact, she spends a horrible evening in an abandoned house where she finds another “Beauty Killer” victim. Can Gretchen be far away?

If you've read the previous two books, then you know what you're getting. Be warned: This series is not for the faint-of-heart. Gretchen is beautiful and charming to be sure, but she is also an amoral serial killer who knows no limits of depravity and cruelty. Author Cain navigates a fine, fragile line, depicting events so horrific that at times one is tempted to set the book aside. Her great skills as an artist, it turns out, are knowing when to back off and let the reader become composed again, and in creating such enthralling characters that the reader will endure the sickness and cruelty because we are so captivated by these characters. We want to see good prevail and evil punished.

Evil at Heart is not a “pleasant” read, to be sure: The best thrillers depict bad people doing hurtful things and can never really be described as pleasant. It is, however, a masterfully written exercise is abject terror, scary as a graveyard at midnight with a killer on the loose. This is a terrific book, if you have the stomach for it: It's horrid, and anything but horrible.

by SCOTT COFFMAN