Chill Factor

A Novel

By: Sandra Brown

Narrated by: Stephen Lang

Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's Summary

Cleary, North Carolina, is a sleepy mountain town, the kind of place where criminal activity is usually limited to parking violations. Not so, lately. Four women have disappeared from Cleary over the past two years. And there's always a blue ribbon left near the spot where each of the women was last seen. There are no bodies, no other clues, and no suspicion as to who their abductor might be. And now, another woman has disappeared without a trace.

It is to this backdrop that Lilly Martin returns to close the sale of her mountain cabin, marking the end of her turbulent eight-year marriage to Dutch Burton, Cleary's chief of police. Dutch's reluctance to let her go isn't Lilly's only obstacle. As she's trying to outrun a snowstorm, her car skids on the icy road and strikes a man. She recognizes the injured man as Ben Tierney, whom she'd met the previous summer. They're forced to wait out the storm in the cabin, but as the hours of their confinement mount, Lilly begins to wonder if the greatest danger to her safety isn't the blizzard outside, but the mysterious man right beside her. Is Ben Tierney the feared abductor? Or is he who he claims to be...her rescuer from harm and from the tragedy that haunts her?

©2005 Sandra Brown (P)2005 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved. AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division.

Critic Reviews

• 2005 Audie Award Nominee, Romance

"Lust, jealousy, and murder suffuse Brown's crisp thriller, set in the snowbound mountains of North Carolina....The snowy suspense will cool off Brown's fans during the dog days of summer." (Publishers Weekly)

I'd have peeked at the ending ...

if I had had the print version - I couldn't stand the suspense. I was dying to know how it ended! I loved it. I enjoyed all the quirky- slightly sleazy -characters in that little town... just about any one of them could have "done it". I thought it was very well done. I loved the touch of romance amidst the suspense, with not too much gore or violence.

A great listen

This one ranks up there with "Envy." The suspense was great throughout. The reader did a very good job, I always knew which character was talking. I recommend this one.

One of Audible's Best

This is probably the best audiobook I have ever purchased from Audible. 13 hours of absolutely-can't-put-it-down listening. The book had a little bit of everything.......suspense, romance, thrills. Highly recommended.

Listened to it twice!

I was glad I didn't head the warnings of some of the other reviews. This was my first Sandra Brown book and I loved it. It does take a while to get used to some of the voices by the narrator (Dutch especially) but toward the end I felt the voice kinda suited him. There were many twists and turns and I never thought she'd bring it all together in the end but surprisingly she didn't leave any question unanswered. I listened to it twice just to pick up on things I may've missed the first time and to pick up on more foreshadowing. I definitely recommend this book! I went on to download Envy by Sandra Brown and liked it as well.

A Love Story and a Serial Killer

Sandra Brown is one of my favorite authors, mainly because I like her storylines of murder and mayhem with a romantic twist to spice it up. This story grabbed my interest and attention from the first sentence. Right out of the gate, the spotlight is squarely placed on one of the main characters which the listener is skillfully led to believe is the killer, but since I know how Ms. Brown likes to fake the listener out, I knew he was not the killer but every clue continued to point his way. The tension builds while the plot and romantic storylines are developed and key characters are introduced.

Ms. Brown skillfully weaves subplots around the main and supporting characters which adds more depth, interest and drama to the main storyline. Stephen Lang narrates and performs the story very well with a range of voices so that listener knows who's speaking without needing to be told.

This novel had me on the edge of my seat at all times because Ms. Brown developed each character well enough that the listener cares about them, even the ones who are unlikeable. The plot lines are easy to follow and are not overly complicated but well developed... An enjoyable read... Highly recommend.

Excellent, excellent book

I found this book hard to put down. One of the best book that I have read this year. Recommended it to several co-workers.

Great ending

The book starts great and ends great. It's in between that had me considering shutting it off. But I didn't. I pushed on and found it to be worth it.

Cartoonish hillbilly accent ruins a lead character

Sometimes an actor's interpretation of a character is merely distracting; in this particular instance, it's wrong to the point of making me regret that I didn't read Chill Factor instead of listening. Stephen Lang does a credible job with characters that are meant to be 'played' for grins, like a just-the-facts-ma'am FBI director. But with one of the key protagonists, he couldn't be farther from the mark.

I'm talking about "Dutch," the ex-husband of the heroine. This is the character that sophisticated Lily is said to have found so charming and "erudite" when they met that she fell for him immediately. But as voiced by Lang, Dutch is cursed with a specific variety of overdone Southern accent that screams "inbred backwoods moonshiner." You can't even call it a drawl; it's as if Dutch is a slow thinker who struggles to speak; the polar opposite of anyone that magazine editor Lily would ever have found attractive.

In fact, until I got to the part of the book where Lily reminisces about their early relationship, and how Dutch captivated an audience when he spoke at a fundraising event, I actually there to be a backstory that would explain the horrible mismatch between the sophisticate and the yokel. He isn't written dim-witted, but he certainly SOUNDS it here.

If Dutch were a minor character, this off-the-mark performance wouldn't matter much. But if Sandra Brown meant to create the tension of a possible three-way love triangle between Lily, Ben Tierney, and Lily's ex-husband, Lang's portrayal of the ex makes it impossible to even imagine Lily and Dutch together in anything but a shotgun wedding.

Tight writing by Brown, and a suspenseful plot. Too bad the audiobook misses the mark.

Great suspense book

This has all of the elements to keep you interested, especially after the first few hours. There's a serial killer on the loose, a stranded female holed up with the main suspect in the killings. Throw in a bit of romance and it makes for an enjoyable read.

Half Romance

As a mystery fan, I was a bit disappointed by this one. I'd guessed the whodunnits by about halfway through. And, I gotta say, there were a lot of romance elements - they're not my cup of tea and I wasn't expecting the, ummmmm, very sexy descriptions of SEVERAL carnal encounters. I found it kinda cliched too - and confess to a few laugh-out-loud moments (and not in a good way.)

Definitely fun and pretty good escapism. But for my money, 'Chill Factor' isn't a great mystery book in any sense.

not bad...

Not having the chance to give it 3 and a half stars, I rounded it up rather than down. I'll probably get other books by this author, and I'm already familiar with Mr Lang, the narrator. A positive aquisition to the library.



*Spoiler* - From the opening lines, I knew that what was implied was not what to be believed - the mystery being who else it could be!

Tense thriller!

Although I guessed 'whodunnit' very early on, I enjoyed this very much. The ending was a bit too twee for me though!

A fairly average thriller

This is a fairly uncomplicated thriller, told from the perspective of several characters set in a secluded town during a blizzard. Many of the characters in the novel are fairly stereotypical, the gruff police officer who has transferred from a large department to the small town, the mysterious stranger in the town, the list goes on. Whilst there are twists to the novel along the way, for the most part they are neither shocking nor entirely unanticipated.

That being said, this is a reasonable slice of entertainment which has made the commute and gym trips much more entertaining. As always the narration by Stephen Lang was just splendid and though the book itself may be lacking somewhat, his superb narration brings it back up.

Don't buy this book!

The abridged version may have been tolerable, but my guess is that even 6 hours would be too long for this padded out thriller. 13 hours was excruciating. If you must read this book, you can get it for about ?2 from service stations (which gives some indication of the shelf-life of the novel). At least then it would be useful as firelighters afterwards.