Twelve years after Police Detective Archie Sheridan stood over the body of a dead girl in Forest Park, in Portland, Oregon [his first homicide case], he is again called to that scene to view the body of another as yet unidentified dead girl. It is only a few months since Archie returned from medical leave, two and a half years since he had been tortured nearly to death during the ten days he had been held prisoner by Gretchen Lowell. In the interim, he and has wife had divorced, then started living together again after a year and a half had passed, hoping they could salvage something together.
Archie had been head of the Beauty Killer task force, and after she was captured and imprisoned, had gone every week to meet with Gretchen Lowell, dubbed by some the Queen of Evil – Sundays at the State Pen, part of his ritual. Gretchen herself had had other rituals. She had her obsessions; Archie’s obsession became Gretchen herself. Archie’s whole being --- his body, life, mind and very soul --- have belonged to Rachel. She had claimed, almost unbelievably, 199 victims --- Archie was to have been the 200th --- but in the end she spared his life, leaving him “only” grotesquely scarred, mentally and physically, and dependent on pain meds. As part of her plea deal, Archie ultimately became the conduit for her confessions and the location of the bodies of 41 of the people she had murdered. And against all reason, Archie remains obsessed --- one might almost say possessed --- by Gretchen.
In a separate story line, we meet Susan Ward, the 28-year-old ambitious and [currently] blue-haired reporter for the Oregon Herald, who was herself nearly the victim of another serial killer, in what became known as the After School Strangler case. After Henry tells her “You care about stories more than people,” she tries to be more sensitive vis-à-vis the girl at the heart of the huge story she is working on about an enormously popular State Senator who had seduced his kids’ 14-year-old babysitter. Susan is brought onboard by Archie to cover the Forest Park murder case, which becomes even bigger when the remains of other bodies are discovered.
Although she has been a very real presence to that point as Archie et al retrospectively go back over the events of the past, Gretchen herself doesn’t make an actual appearance until page 88, when she escapes from the penitentiary [something broadcast loudly on the back page of the book] and, naturally, contacts Archie immediately. And the horror starts anew. From that point, things go into high gear, and this reader could not put the book down. Gross descriptions of torture and sadism are kept to a minimum, and the book is just as compulsively readable as was “HeartSick,” the book which introduced these characters.
Recommended
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Gloria Feit