Archie Sheridan & Gretchen Lowell

About the Archie Sheridan & Gretchen Lowell series

Detective Archie Sheridan spent years hunting the serial killer known as the Beauty Killer before she caught him instead, tortured him for ten days, and then -- inexplicably -- let him live and turned herself in. Chelsea Cain's series opens two years later in Heartsick (2007): Sheridan, addicted to the painkillers that got him through his captivity, is pulled back into an active case and finds he needs to consult the one person who understands the new killer's psychology best -- Gretchen Lowell herself, now his prisoner as much as he was once hers. Their relationship, equal parts obsession, dependency, and mutual damage, is the engine of the whole series far more than any individual case.

Cain, a Portland-based novelist and former alt-weekly columnist, built the series around the gap between the two lead characters -- rather than a straightforward hunter-and-hunted structure, each book complicates whether Sheridan can ever really be free of Lowell, and whether he even wants to be. Heartsick won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was named among Stephen King's best books of the year; the five sequels that followed kept the same uneasy central dynamic through Lowell's escapes, recaptures, and manipulations until the story's conclusion in Let Me Go (2013).