Mean Streak

June 23, 2014
At the start of this solid novel of romantic suspense from bestseller Brown (Deadline), heiress Emory Charbonneau, a successful Atlanta-based pediatrician, disappears while training for a marathon; the police, along with her colleagues and husband, are soon engaged in efforts to locate her. Awakening after a painful collapse, Charbonneau finds herself in the remote cabin of a handsome, nameless man. While he doesn’t restrain her, he does refuse to drive her to her car, citing inclement weather. She’s distrustful of the claim that he has no phone and begins to question his motives. A parallel plotline involving FBI agent Jack Connell’s search for a man involved with a deadly incident intersects with Charbonneau’s predicament, casting further suspicions on her captor. Florid prose and problematic power dynamics render sex scenes more troubling than titillating, but Brown ends her gone-girl narrative with a surprising denouement that hits the reader like a well-aimed blow to the back of the head. Agent: Maria Carvainis, Maria Carvainis Agency.

July 15, 2014
The perennially best-selling Brown checks in with another "woman-in-peril-hunky-guy-to-the-rescue" romantic thriller.Emory, a wealthy Atlanta-based pediatrician who runs marathons, is training for an upcoming race in a remote mountainous region of North Carolina. She's left behind her self-centered husband, Jeff, with whom she's had one of their frequent arguments; that's fine with Jeff, who plans to spend Emory's absence with his mistress. But then Emory's plans go very wrong. She wakes up injured and disoriented in a strange cabin with a tall, gorgeous man who refuses to divulge his identity. The mystery man tells her she had an accident on the trail and he brought her back there to recover. Emory suffered a head wound and is both woozy and mistrustful of the stranger, but after a day or so, when she feels well enough to leave, she discovers the mountain road is covered with ice, socked in with a pea-soup fog and not at all navigable, so she heads back to the cabin without even trying to get home. As Emory falls in love with the tall stranger, her petulant husband comes under scrutiny by two small-town police detectives who believe he might not be telling them everything about his missing wife. Brown throws in some steamy sex, a mysterious mistress and an FBI agent who's searching for the mystery man. Brown knows how to pace her stories so fans will keep turning the pages, but while her prose is clean and efficient, readers searching for characters who rise above the stereotypical will be sorely disappointed in this plot-driven entry.Brown's novels share several qualities: They're entertaining, competently written, full of twists and turns, but ultimately forgettable.

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April 1, 2014

With her husband slow to report her disappearance in the North Carolina wilderness (they'd been quarreling), pediatrician and marathon runner Emily Charbonneau wakes up the captive of a man who won't reveal his name. But he could be her rescuer; there's something suspicious about that husband.

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