Thrillers & Suspense
![Sandra Brown - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000AQ0XWO.jpg)
Chill Factor: A Novel
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Seeing Red comes a suspense novel about a woman trapped in a remote cabin with a man who may be a serial killer.
Five women are missing from the sleepy mountain town of Cleary, North Carolina, and a blue ribbon has been left near where each woman was last seen. Lilly Martin has returned to Cleary to close the sale of her cabin. But when her car skids and strikes a stranger, Ben Tierney, as he emerges from the woods, they've no choice but to wait out a brutal blizzard in the cabin. And as the hours of their confinement mount, Lilly wonders if the greater threat to her safety isn't the storm, but the stranger beside her....
Five women are missing from the sleepy mountain town of Cleary, North Carolina, and a blue ribbon has been left near where each woman was last seen. Lilly Martin has returned to Cleary to close the sale of her cabin. But when her car skids and strikes a stranger, Ben Tierney, as he emerges from the woods, they've no choice but to wait out a brutal blizzard in the cabin. And as the hours of their confinement mount, Lilly wonders if the greater threat to her safety isn't the storm, but the stranger beside her....
Editorial Reviews
"Virtuoso plot twists...Brown's latest thriller engages the primal senses."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Lust, jealousy, and murder suffuse Brown's crisp thriller."
-- Publishers Weekly
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Lust, jealousy, and murder suffuse Brown's crisp thriller."
-- Publishers Weekly
Readers Top Reviews
Joy WrightMrs D R
It was an interesting set up with lots of misdirection. The characters were so troubled. I’ll read another by Sandra Brown.
~AudioBookaHolic~
~Chill Factor~ *set in the small town of Cleary, North Carolina, where magazine publisher Lilly Martin is packing up her things at the cabin she shared with her ex-husband, Dutch Burton. Now the police chief of Cleary, Dutch desperately wants another chance with Lilly. She refuses, and he leaves the cabin, warning her of an impending blizzard. On her way down from the mountains, she accidentally hits a man in the road. She manages to get the man, Ben Tierney, back to her cabin, where they decide to wait out the storm. But the more time she spends with Tierney, the more Lilly fears he might be the serial killer dubbed "Blue," who has been abducting women in Cleary for the past year. Despite her mounting concerns, Lilly can't help her growing attraction for the man. Back in town, Dutch is frantic when he learns Lilly is trapped up in the cabin with Tierney, whom the FBI also suspects might be Blue. Dutch's concern grows, and he mounts a desperate attempt to rescue his ex-wife. The suspense builds as Brown's novel chugs toward a gripping, surprising conclusion.* * After Lilly has packed up all that she wants from the cabin that belonged to her and her ex-husband Dutch (Cleary, North Carolina police chief) Dutch wants a second chance with Lilly and she is finished as far as she's concerned the marriage is over. Being frustrated leaves Lilly in the cabin with a bad storm coming, Lilly falls asleep wakes a while later. checks the cabin one last time locks the door and starts down the mountain roads are icy while driving down the mountain road a man comes out of the woods on to the road right in her path Lilly hits the brakes the man jumps back, but the car fish tails and the man is hit, Lilly gets out to find Tierney.has hit his head on a rock and it's bleeding pretty bad,and her car hit a tree when lilly helps him back to the cabin, and she checks him out he has the symptoms of a concussion and his ribs are bruised *Before her suspicions about Ben arise, she manages to get a partial call to her ex-husband, who happens to be Cleary's chief of police, but the call is just enough to get Dutch Barton's dander up. Dutch has a lot of problems, between his wife divorcing him, being fired from the Atlanta PD, the parents of a missing girl showing up at the police station at all hours to pester him about progress on the case, and now Lilly is shacked up in the mountains with another man. To make matters worse, a couple of interfering FBI agents show up to take over his investigation, and they aren't showing him the respect he deserves. Dutch's best friend, Wes Hamer, is the high school football coach and on the city council. For his own reasons, he is just as anxious to reach the mountain cabin before anyone else, and they're all wrapped up in his football star son's relationship with one of the missing women. The whole quiet town of Cleary ...
Kara J. Jorges~Au
The ink isn't quite dry on Lilly Martin's divorce papers when she and her ex-husband, Dutch Barton, part for the last time after selling their mountain cabin in Cleary, Virginia. Dutch keeps trying to win her back, but Lilly is through with him, and the emotional exhaustion brought on by their last meeting has her falling asleep when she should be heading back down the mountain before the weather gets bad. When she wakes up and takes off, she winds up hitting hiker Ben Tierney and crashing her car. The two of them limp back through the woods to Lilly's cabin to wait out the storm, where they both reminisce about the first time they met on a kayaking trip the summer before. Attraction had flared between them, but Lilly put Tierney off because she was still married. Just when Ben thinks he may have a second chance with Lilly, however, she stumbles upon his backpack, which is full of incriminating evidence tying Ben to the disappearances of five women in Cleary over the past two years. With cell phone service spotty at best and roads made completely impassable by a raging blizzard, Lilly is stuck with a man who just might be a serial killer. Before her suspicions about Ben arise, she manages to get a partial call to her ex-husband, who happens to be Cleary's chief of police, but the call is just enough to get Dutch Barton's dander up. Dutch has a lot of problems, between his wife divorcing him, being fired from the Atlanta PD, the parents of a missing girl showing up at the police station at all hours to pester him about progress on the case, and now Lilly is shacked up in the mountains with another man. To make matters worse, a couple of interfering FBI agents show up to take over his investigation, and they aren't showing him the respect he deserves. Dutch's best friend, Wes Hamer, is the high school football coach and on the city council. For his own reasons, he is just as anxious to reach the mountain cabin before anyone else, and they're all wrapped up in his football star son's relationship with one of the missing women. The whole quiet town of Cleary is a hotbed of secrets, between a school teacher and her secret lover, the police chief's problems, and Wes Hamer's infidelities, which all seem to be tied to the disappearances of the five women. While the tension heats to the boiling point in town, Lilly and Tierney have their own issues to deal with, between her asthma, his injuries, and the evidence she keeps finding that points to him as the killer, every time she's just about to trust him. Once again, Sandra Brown delivers a page-turning suspense story that bounces from character to character, creating more questions than answers as the story unfolds. Living in Minnesota, the only issue I had was with the woeful inadequacies at the cabin. Don't they have insulation in Virginia to prevent water pipes from freezing? ...
debbie ansbroKara
Some of the long famous authors are writing slop these days….or others are writing slop in their names. I’m thrilled that Sandra Brown isn’t one of the slackers! This is a book with solid characters and a good mystery. I had picked the wrong bad guy….by the end I couldn’t put it down and stayed up way too late to find the answer to “who done it”! Highly recommend!!
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1 The grave was substandard.
The storm was forecast to be a record breaker.
Little more than a shallow bowl gouged out of unyielding earth, the grave had been dug for Millicent Gunn -- age eighteen, short brown hair, delicate build, five feet four inches tall, reported missing a week ago. The grave was long enough to accommodate her height. Its depth, or lack thereof, could be remedied in the spring, when the ground began to thaw. If scavengers didn't dispose of the body before then.
Ben Tierney shifted his gaze from the new grave to the others nearby. Four of them. Forest debris and vegetative decay provided natural camouflage, yet each lent subtle variations to the rugged topography if one knew what to look for. A dead tree had fallen across one, concealing it entirely except to someone with a discerning eye.
Like Tierney.
He took one last look into the empty, shallow grave, then picked up the shovel at his feet and backed away. As he did, he noticed the dark imprints left by his boots in the white carpet of sleet. They didn't concern him overmuch. If the meteorologists were calling it right, the footprints would soon be covered by several inches of frozen precipitation. When the ground thawed, the prints would be absorbed into the mud.
In any case, he didn't stop to worry about them. He had to get off the mountain. Now.
He'd left his car on the road a couple hundred yards from the summit and the makeshift graveyard. Although he was now moving downhill, there was no path to follow through the dense woods. Thick ground cover gave him limited traction, but the terrain was uneven and hazardous, made even more so by the blowing precipitation that hampered his vision. Though he was in a hurry, he was forced to pick his way carefully to avoid a misstep.
Weathermen had been predicting this storm for days. A confluence of several systems had the potential of creating one of the worst winter storms in recent memory. People in its projected path were being advised to take precautions, stock provisions, and rethink travel plans. Only a fool would have ventured onto the mountain today. Or someone with pressing business to take care of.
Like Tierney.
The cold drizzle that had been falling since early afternoon had turned into freezing rain mixed with sleet. Pellets of it stung his face like pinpricks as he thrashed through the forest. He hunched his shoulders, bringing his collar up to his ears, which were already numb from cold.
The wind velocity had increased noticeably. Trees were taking a beating, their naked branches clacking together like rhythm sticks in the fierce wind. It stripped needles off the evergreens and whipped them about. One struck his cheek like a blow dart.
Twenty-five miles an hour, out of the northwest, he thought with that part of his brain that automatically registered the current status of his surroundings. He knew these things -- wind velocity, time, temperature, direction -- instinctually, as though he had a built-in weather vane, clock, thermometer, and GPS constantly feeding pertinent information to his subconscious.
It was an innate talent that he had developed into a skill, which had been finely tuned by spending much of his adult life outdoors. He didn't have to think consciously about this ever-changing environmental data but frequently relied on his ability to grasp it immediately when it was needed.
He was relying on it now, because it wouldn't do to be caught on the summit of Cleary Peak -- the second highest in North Carolina, after Mount Mitchell -- carrying a shovel and running away from four old graves and one freshly dug.
The local police weren't exactly reputed for their dogged investigations and crime-solving success. In fact, the department was a local joke. The chief was a has-been, big-city detective who'd been ousted from the department on which he'd served.
Chief Dutch Burton now led a band of inept small-town officers -- yokels outfitted in spiffy uniforms with shiny badges -- who had been hard-pressed to catch the culprit spray-painting obscenities on the trash receptacles behind the Texaco station.
Now they were focused on the five unsolved missing persons cases. Despite their insufficiencies, Cleary's finest had deduced that having five women vanish from one small community within two and a half years was, in all probability, more than a coincidence.
In a metr...
The storm was forecast to be a record breaker.
Little more than a shallow bowl gouged out of unyielding earth, the grave had been dug for Millicent Gunn -- age eighteen, short brown hair, delicate build, five feet four inches tall, reported missing a week ago. The grave was long enough to accommodate her height. Its depth, or lack thereof, could be remedied in the spring, when the ground began to thaw. If scavengers didn't dispose of the body before then.
Ben Tierney shifted his gaze from the new grave to the others nearby. Four of them. Forest debris and vegetative decay provided natural camouflage, yet each lent subtle variations to the rugged topography if one knew what to look for. A dead tree had fallen across one, concealing it entirely except to someone with a discerning eye.
Like Tierney.
He took one last look into the empty, shallow grave, then picked up the shovel at his feet and backed away. As he did, he noticed the dark imprints left by his boots in the white carpet of sleet. They didn't concern him overmuch. If the meteorologists were calling it right, the footprints would soon be covered by several inches of frozen precipitation. When the ground thawed, the prints would be absorbed into the mud.
In any case, he didn't stop to worry about them. He had to get off the mountain. Now.
He'd left his car on the road a couple hundred yards from the summit and the makeshift graveyard. Although he was now moving downhill, there was no path to follow through the dense woods. Thick ground cover gave him limited traction, but the terrain was uneven and hazardous, made even more so by the blowing precipitation that hampered his vision. Though he was in a hurry, he was forced to pick his way carefully to avoid a misstep.
Weathermen had been predicting this storm for days. A confluence of several systems had the potential of creating one of the worst winter storms in recent memory. People in its projected path were being advised to take precautions, stock provisions, and rethink travel plans. Only a fool would have ventured onto the mountain today. Or someone with pressing business to take care of.
Like Tierney.
The cold drizzle that had been falling since early afternoon had turned into freezing rain mixed with sleet. Pellets of it stung his face like pinpricks as he thrashed through the forest. He hunched his shoulders, bringing his collar up to his ears, which were already numb from cold.
The wind velocity had increased noticeably. Trees were taking a beating, their naked branches clacking together like rhythm sticks in the fierce wind. It stripped needles off the evergreens and whipped them about. One struck his cheek like a blow dart.
Twenty-five miles an hour, out of the northwest, he thought with that part of his brain that automatically registered the current status of his surroundings. He knew these things -- wind velocity, time, temperature, direction -- instinctually, as though he had a built-in weather vane, clock, thermometer, and GPS constantly feeding pertinent information to his subconscious.
It was an innate talent that he had developed into a skill, which had been finely tuned by spending much of his adult life outdoors. He didn't have to think consciously about this ever-changing environmental data but frequently relied on his ability to grasp it immediately when it was needed.
He was relying on it now, because it wouldn't do to be caught on the summit of Cleary Peak -- the second highest in North Carolina, after Mount Mitchell -- carrying a shovel and running away from four old graves and one freshly dug.
The local police weren't exactly reputed for their dogged investigations and crime-solving success. In fact, the department was a local joke. The chief was a has-been, big-city detective who'd been ousted from the department on which he'd served.
Chief Dutch Burton now led a band of inept small-town officers -- yokels outfitted in spiffy uniforms with shiny badges -- who had been hard-pressed to catch the culprit spray-painting obscenities on the trash receptacles behind the Texaco station.
Now they were focused on the five unsolved missing persons cases. Despite their insufficiencies, Cleary's finest had deduced that having five women vanish from one small community within two and a half years was, in all probability, more than a coincidence.
In a metr...
