Beginning with Heartsick, Chelsea Cain's popular Archie Sheridan mystery series has been one long story: each novel picks up where the previous one ended. Kill Me Twice follows The Night Season, which provided a brief respite from Archie's nemesis, Gretchen Lowell (aka the Beauty Killer), but now she's back. A dead body, most of its skin removed, is found on Portland's Mount Tabor, with a lily on the ground nearby. The viciousness of the killing reminds Archie of Gretchen's MO, but she's incarcerated in the Oregon State Hospital. (Portland and the surrounding area figure prominently throughout the series.)
Another body is found downtown, burned beneath the famous "Portland, Oregon" sign, along with another lily. Meanwhile Gretchen has asked Susan Ward, a former reporter and regular "associate" of Archie's, to meet with her. She tells Susan about a murder she committed in St. Helen's when she was a teenager--lots of blood and her trademark slicing off of the nose: "It came off in my hand," Gretchen recalls. "Flesh always looks so much smaller once it's dismembered." She also says she had a child--and, by the way, they should be looking for an old accomplice of hers, Ryan Motley.
Short chapters (à la James Patterson) provide breakneck reading, and Cain does a good job of bringing all her pieces of the mystery together, throwing in just the right amount of gore and surprises. And, of course, we know when we reach the end that Gretchen will be back again soon. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher and Portland resident