Shades of Hannibal shadow this lunchbox beauty

Gretchen Lowell is a drop-dead beauty who will tear your heart in two. Then she'll pack it, warm and wet, in a pair of school lunchboxes.

A serial killer with a taste for dissecting her prey alive, Gretchen once extracted a girl's intestine with a crochet hook, inch by inch. She first appeared in Chelsea Cain's debut thriller, Heartsick. Now she's back in a thumping sequel, Sweetheart.

As the novel opens, our blonde psychopath is locked inside the Oregon State Pen. Portland detective Archie Sheridan, one of her victims, is popping painkillers and struggling to recreate a life with his estranged family.

When three corpses turn up in Forest Park, Archie has more than enough to occupy his thoughts. Yet he obsesses about Gretchen, the lilac-scented beauty who seduced him before driving a nail through his ribs and plucking out his spleen.

"I'm the only one who's ever been that far inside you," Gretchen coos, recalling the scent of Archie's sticky blood from the time she tortured him, then saved his life.

Do I buy it? Nah. Can I suspend my disbelief? With pleasure, though my suspenders strain under Archie's infatuation and a couple of plot points.

Archie soon crosses paths with Susan Ward, a dippy yet determined newspaper reporter with turquoise hair. (It's Portland, after all, and she's all of 28.) Susan is wrapping up an investigation into a five-term American senator who bedded a 14-year-old babysitter, then covered it up and paid her off.

Before Susan's scoop can be published, the congressman dies in a car that swerves off the Fremont Bridge and into the Willamette River. "No skid marks," Susan notes.

Then Gretchen escapes, putting Archie and his family at risk.

Cain has a peppy style and an eye for detail. "The woman had been dead a while," she writes on page one. "Her skull was exposed; her scalp had been pulled back, a tangle of red hair separated from the hairline by several inches. Animals had eaten her face, exposing her eyes and brain to the forces of putrefaction." I'll skip the really gross bits.

With a tight plot and a fast pace, she propels you through newspaper deadlines, a police lockdown and a forest fire. The dialogue is convincingly vernacular, though a tad theatrical at times, as when Archie is asked what he wants.

"Redemption," he answers. "Barring that, distraction."

I'll settle for distraction like Sweetheart any day.