Review: Sweetheart

Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sweetheart is the second book in the Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell series, and I’m annoyed with myself for waiting so long to read it. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t planned on waiting so long to read it: I just found it hard to find the book for a reasonable price. After finishing the first book and having a lot of fun with it, I was constantly on the lookout for Sweetheart selling at a decent price.

Was the wait worth it? Yes, it was certainly worth it.

The series seems to have been made with me in mind. I love a good crime thriller; I love stories that follow the same serial killer; I love a police officer that has been damaged in many ways. The Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell series offers me all of those things. It’s not the perfect story, but it is certainly a series that has well and truly pulled me in.

I’ll admit that the writing always takes me a little while to get into. Whilst Chelsea Cain writes a wonderful story, I cannot say her writing style is one of my favourites. It isn’t that her writing style is bad – I doubt I would enjoy her stories as much as I do if such was the case – but it isn’t quite the lyrical, almost flowery, writing I favour. It always takes me some time to get into her work, it takes me a while to be lured into the stories she writes.

As with the first book, though, despite the writing style taking a while to pull me back into the story, things did get going very quickly. This one wasn’t as fast paced as the first story, but there was a lot going on. When things did start to come together the action really picked up, and we were pulled along for the ride. It became impossible to put the book down, the pages turning themselves as I hurried my way to the conclusion.

As with the first book, however, my favourite aspect was Archie. The crime storyline was fun, but it wasn’t as enjoyable as the first book. It was the Archie and Gretchen storyline that really made this wonderful. Archie is so damaged, and as twisted as it makes me, I love this about him. He’s not the most interesting of characters – but there’s something about how broken he is that makes me curious about what will happen next. I adore his character, waiting to see what new development will occur. Whilst I wasn’t overjoyed about some of the flashes to the past regarding Archie as a character, what happened to him in the present time of this book was a lot of fun.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this one. I adore the way that the Archie and Gretchen storyline is intertwined into the mystery aspect of the story, and whilst one aspect may shine brighter than the other, it works to guarantee I will be reading the next book.

As I said in my review of book one, it’s not a perfect read but I am certainly part of the fandom and need to see where things go from here.

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