Review: Mean Streak by Sandra Brown

Mean Streak is  a riveting book and kept me on the edge of my seat until the very last page.  I resisted the mystery/suspense genre for a long time but I have read 3 great books this summer in this genre that I really enjoyed, and Mean Streak is among them.

There is so much content to the plot of this book that I am eager to write about, but I also don’t want to give too much away.  At the core of the book is the story of Emory Chardonneau, a well-respected and hardworking physician who likes to run marathons.  One weekend while she is training in the remote hills of North Carolina, Emory suffers a blow to the head and wakes up in a remote cabin with a man hovering over her that she has never seen before.  Can she trust this man to help her or is he a threat?  This stranger will not give her any details about his life, not even his name.  Emory spends four days with this unnamed man and her experiences with him challenge her very neat, well-ordered and uncomplicated life.

Sandra Brown has the ability to provide us with entertaining characters who range from heroic and likeable, to downright bad and morally bankrupt.  The two police officers who are investigating Emory’s disappearance seem, on the surface, like simple cops who don’t know how to conduct an investigation.  However, they are much more savvy than their southern accents and laid back investigating techniques make them seem.

We also find in Mean Streak the typical characters a reader might expect in a suspense novel such as the tired FBI agent addicted to his job, the suspicious husband that is having an affair, and the unpredictable scary bad guys with no morals or scruples.  But the way in which Sandra Brown slowly unravels the plot and intertwines each character into that plot, makes the characters anything but ordinary or mundane.

If you want a great book that will keep you guessing until the very last page, then make Mean Streak one of your final “must-read” summer books.

*Thanks so much to Grand Central Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book through Netgalley.