Mean Streak

Mean Streak is a thriller by the American writer Sandra Brown, published in 2014.

Dr Emory Charbonneau is a paediatrician and a marathon runner, and she goes missing on a mountain road in North Carolina. Her husband, Jeff, is still irritated about an argument the two of them have had, and he does not report her disappearance until some time has passed, by which point the trail has gone cold in the most literal way: fog and ice have closed over the wilderness and brought the search to a halt.

Emory is alive, and she is the prisoner of a man whose violent history is dark enough that he refuses to tell her his name. She is determined to escape him, and she is willing to take whatever risks that requires.

As her husband's account of what has happened begins to come apart and the FBI closes in on her captor, Emory has to consider something she would not have imagined at the outset: that the unnamed man may be keeping her alive, and that the people who mean her harm are not the ones she assumed.