The cover design of the German edition was giving me the chills already just by looking at it. So, no question, I had to have and read it. You can see the cover at the end of my review. I don´t know exactly when I became a fan of the author, but with her style being different from those other thriller authors have (each of them is great in their own way) she has been a guarantor for great stories over the years. The author knows how to balance perfectly between an almost obscene language and being blunt without losing her high level. And that´s what I admire about her work the most.


Chill Factor*
by Sandra Brown
Publisher Simon & Schuster on August 1, 2006
Genre Thriller
Pages 360
Format Paperback
Source Publisher*
Goodreads
✶✶✶✶✶

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 great threat to her safety isn´t the storm, but the stranger beside her …

Story
For two years, the Cleary police tried to capture the girl murderer Blue, but so far in vain. As the young Millicent disappears, police chief Dutch Burton comes under pressure, especially now that the FBI is also in and a blizzard is forcing a temporary break in the search operation. In the midst of these brutal weather forces, Lilly Martin, the ex-wife of Dutch, meets the somewhat mysterious Ben Tierney and they must seek shelter in the lodge of Lilly. At first, the forced get-together in the hut works, but when Lilly finds a blue tie in Ben´s clothes she is seized with panic.

Style
Sandra Brown speaks in this thriller in a very direct, almost obscene language, but without lacking in style or being mediocre. The excitement awakens the author through the events that are gradually taking place and through a clever psychological cat-and-mouse game between the characters and the weather, then magnifying them brilliantly, chapter by chapter, until the final showdown. I particularly liked the fact that it is almost impossible to anticipate the killer quite early or even to have a guess.

Characters
The author has described her characters in a concise, clear, and very succinct manner, demonstrating with them how life in a small American town goes. The emotions range from desperate anger, boundless hatred over spurned love to absolute obsession. It is unbelievable what a feeling these characters generate when reading. Especially the figure of Lilly Martin stands out. Not only because she lives through a sensory roller coaster, which does not leave a person, who has a feeling in the body, cold. But also, because it arrives so real and strong to the reader, that while reading, I already thought that I AM the one who is gasping for breath and completely gray in the face.


Conclusion
An extremely brilliant and captivating thriller in which not only the weather has brute force. Wonderfully enthralling.



Happy reading













*I read the German edition Eisnacht by Blanvalet on October 12, 2009


Sandra Brown
Sandra Brown ©Gregory Heisler Studios




Sandra Brown is the author of 63 New York Times bestsellers. Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published over seventy novels, bringing the number of copies of her books in print worldwide to upwards of eighty million. Her work has been translated into thirty-four languages. A lifelong Texan, Sandra Brown was born in Waco, grew up in Fort Worth and attended Texas Christian University, majoring in English. She is much in demand as a speaker and guest television hostess. Her episode on truTV´s Murder by the Book premiered the series in 2008. She appeared in 2010 on Investigation Discovery´s new series, Hardcover Mysteries. In 2009 Brown detoured from her thrillers to write Rainwater, a much acclaimed powerfully moving story about honor and sacrifice during the Great Depression. Brown holds an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Texas Christian University where she and her husband Michael Brown, have instituted the ELF, a scholarship annually awarded to a student pursuing a fiction-writing career. In 2008, she was named Thriller Master, the top award given by the International Thriller Writer´s Association. Other awards and commendations include the 2007 Texas Medal of Arts Award for Literature and the Romance Writers of America´s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 she and four colleagues went on a week-long USO tour to Afghanistan, meeting with service members on numerous bases. Sandra is the past president of the Mystery Writers of America in 2012. She lives in Arlington, Texas, with her husband, Michael Brown.

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