"Mean Streak" Sandra Brown

“An affair? Jeff?”

“You think it’s beyond him?”

“No, I just can’t imagine him working up enough emotion or blood flow to get hard.” 

― Sandra Brown, Mean Streak

As my occasional readers know, I am a sucker for a bookstore, and even more so a bookstore in an airport.  It is a compulsion - I have to buy a book printed on paper even if I am carrying my iPad with its substantial electronic and audible library.  This is an MEM purchase from a recent trip to Stuttgart.  Generally I would shy away from those names that are so often on the shelf, James Patterson, James Baldacci, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, etc., exactly those authors that He-who-caters-to-me reads all the time.  But there were no other good literary choices on this particular shelves.

I started reading this on the plane, even though I should have been grading or prepping for class instead, and stayed up late several nights to finish it.  A fun, mindless, escapist read.

I would like to think that I avoid the writers-as-entrepreneurs based on my knowledge of them, and I have read a few.  But not Sandra Brown.  He-who-caters is particularly drawn to female authors like her.  When we met, his book collection included everything at the time from Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton.  I think Brown's short, witty conversational style is something HWC would like.  I'm not exactly sure what he is looking for in the reading he does, which is prodigious, but maybe at the next used-book sale I go to I'll have to pick up some of her books for him.

I don't really want to talk about the plot of this book, because even though I cuddled up with it for a couple of nights, I still have some disdain for this type of writing.  But here it is anyway:  Emory is a well-respected doctor with plenty of money from her family.  She and her husband, Jeff, do not seem to be connecting well lately.  She disappears during a marathon-training run in an Appalachian national park, but Jeff doesn't report it right away.  The police suspect Jeff of 'instant divorce' and investigate, and meanwhile Emory is being held captive by a mysterious man who won't tell her his name, and an FBI agent on the west coast has a new lead for tracking down a man he has been hunting for years.  Add in some extra-marital affairs, medical emergencies, hostile hill-folk and jealousy gone to seed and you have all the standard ingredients of pedestrian mystery fiction.

Of course, there are twists and turns in the story just as there are in the mountain roads.  But plot twists are mundane.  Even so, I enjoyed the misdirection of the plot and the repartee of the characters.  There were some pretty steamy scenes as well.  Always a bonus. 

Another Sandra Brown book for me?  Not unless it is the only choice at another airport bookstore.  There are too many other good reads out there for me.