CHILL FACTOR by Sandra Brown

Cleary, North Carolina, with a record-breaking storm setting in. One of the worst winter storms in recent history. People are
being advised to take precautions, stock provisions, and stay at home.
Ben Tierney is on the mountain, looking at 4 old shallow graves, and 1 new one which is waiting for Millicent Gunn, reported missing a week ago.
Police Chief Dutch Burton and his newly divorced wife Lilly are packing up their belongings in the mountain cabin they once
shared together. She is leaving for good, and going back to Atlanta to carry on with her life, alone. Dutch finally leaves and exhausted, she falls asleep, only to wake as the storm picks up speed. She has to drive off the mountain in icy conditions.

Suddenly a human figure jumps into her path, and she swerves and crashes her car into a tree. She finds she has hit Ben Tierney, he is injured, but not too seriously it seems. They need to get out of the oncoming storm and head back to Lilly's cabin.

Wes and Scott Hamer, father and son, are training together in the high school gym. Scott is resentful of his father's insistence that he lift more and more weights, he just wants to get out of there and go home for dinner. He is thinking about Millicent Gunn.
Marilee and William Ritt, brother and sister and owners of the town drugstore, prepare to leave work and get home before the storm worsens. Marilee is a teacher at the high school. She and her brother are both still single and live together. She overhears two of her female students talking about the recent disappearances of 5 women. The one girl says her father has given her a gun to keep in her car, and told her not to hesitate to use it. Wes and Scott walk in and Wes immediately starts flirting with Marilee. Very soon, chaos reigns in town. Traffic is congested, traffic lights are out, sleet is pelting down, the police have their hands full trying to control the pandemonium generated by the approaching storm. And in the midst of all this, Dutch has to deal with the parents of the missing girl.

Meanwhile, the FBI are investigating Ben Tierney's background, and have come up with some
interesting facts...

The build-up of tension is gripping, along with the bone chilling cold, as Dutch strives in vain to rescue Lilly, and his ever-increasing fear of the man she is trapped in the cabin with.

A really good, fast moving thriller, "Chill Factor"races towards its chilling climax.

Happy reading!