Portland Detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she captured and tortured him. Now Gretchen is locked away, while Archie is in a prison of another kind—addicted to painkillers, and powerless to erase those ten days from his mind. When another killer begins snatching teenage girls, Archie pulls himself together to investigate the murders. Newspaper reporter Susan Ward begins following Archie's investigation, sparking a deadly game between Archie, Susan, an elusive killer, and even Gretchen. But if they can catch this sadist, maybe somehow Archie can free himself from Gretchen once and for all.

Chelsea Cain lived the first few years of her life on an Iowa commune, then grew up in Bellingham, WA, where the infamous Green River killer was “the boogieman” of her youth. The true story of the Green River killer’s capture was the inspiration for the story of Gretchen and Archie. She started writing Heartsick to kill time while she was pregnant. The author of a weekly column in The Oregonian, Cain lives in Portland with her husband and daughter.