Dead Girls and Dying Authors

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95

A few years ago Oregonian entertainment columnist Chelsea Cain wrote Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, a hilarious parody of Nancy Drew books. Now she's taking a stab at the serial killer genre with Heartsick, a more ambitious - but ultimately far less satisfying - effort than Confessions.

That said, Heartsick has a lot going for it. In an unconventional narrative maneuver Cain serves up two protagonists, both intriguing in all their virtues and flaws. Archie Sheridan is a pill-popping Portland, Oregon detective who - two years after nearly dying in the torture chamber of notorious serial killer Gretchen Lowell - rejoins to the force to track down a killer who has strangled numerous Portland high school girls and left their bodies to be found on the banks of nearby islands and river walkways. Throughout his search he's shadowed by Susan Ward, a young journalist assigned to write a series of articles on Sheridan and the recent rash of murders.

Sheridan and his investigative team have pegged the current killer to be a man, possibly a teacher or janitor at one of the high schools. Susan stares down her own demons by revisiting her high school stomping grounds to do research, reliving memories of a sexual relationship with one of her teachers. Archie takes an even wilder stroll down memory lane. It turns out that he's developed a variation of Stockholm Syndrome, meaning that he harbors a fierce emotional attachment to Gretchen, the woman who broke his ribs, spoon-fed him Drano, carved a heart on his chest and removed his spleen.

Heartsick is creepy and engaging for about 200 pages, and then Cain loses control of her unusual plot structure, throws her hands in that air and serves up a really stupid and unexciting climax. Even when the story goes off the rails it's hard to put it down - particularly if you're from Portland because Cain does a good job evoking the local color.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Houghton Mifflin Company, $26

Philip Roth - one of America's most decorated writers, with a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards to his name - is perhaps best known for the Zuckerman Books, a series of novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer widely considered to be Roth's alter ego. Roth wrote a series of Zuckerman books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then revived the franchise in the late 1990s with the phenomenal trio American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain.

Now he swears he's finishing Nathan off with the recently published Exit Ghost. Nathan doesn't literally die in the book, but he leaves his 11-year hideaway in the Berkshires only to face bewilderment, humiliation and the constant bothers of impotence and incontinence (caused by his prostate surgery about 10 years ago) in his old haunt, New York City. Now in his early 70s, he pines for a 30-year-old woman and tries to prevent a persistent young writer from writing a tell-all biography about a deceased writer who was Zuckerman's mentor and inspiration in the 1950s.

With themes of death and the irreversible decline of American society, Exit Ghost is hardly a light read. But considering the grim subject matter this is a surprisingly quick and enjoyable read, with zippy pages of theatrical "He Said, She Said" dialogue between Zuckerman and his temptress. Overall this is a memorable, fitting end to a literary saga, though I found the lengthy tribute to sportswriter George Plimpton toward the end to be an unwelcome distraction.