Hey Curious One! It’s been a killer week for me, and I was desperate for a break from all these shifters! I decided to dive into the world of Chill Factor by Sandra Brown. She’s a new author for me, I’ve never read her work before. I was a bit shocked to discover that Chill Factor was originally published in 2005! I’ll explain why below as we dig into Brown’s world today.
Driven By Suspicion
Chill Factor was largely driven by suspicion. Even for the reader, we were being driven to believe that Tierney was the killer from the very first page until the final two chapters. That may be a common element in many suspense or crime novels, but this was unique. The two main characters were trapped by a blizzard in a remote cabin too far from town to walk for help. Plus, there was a killer at large!
Chill Factor Explains it All Away
Every action that Tierney explained away to Lilly, more things were discovered that made her question who exactly he was and how he knew so much.
To make things worse, they were acquainted prior to being trapped in the cabin together. They spent a whole day together, riding the white waters of the river for a day of lesson and adventure rafting. Tierney is a travel writer and Lilly runs/manages a women’s magazine. They were attracted to each other immediately, connecting on the reeling feeling of losing a child. But Lilly was married, so nothing happened.
However, now, while trapped in the cabin with Tierney, Lilly was no longer married, her divorce from abusive husband and local sheriff Burton fresh as the falling snow. Their connection was almost immediate again and it took a lot of convincing before Lilly trusted Tierney.
Who is the Killer?
I want to add here that I only suspected Tierney for three chapters. After that, I was suspicious of the High School kid, Scott. Up until the middle of chapter twenty-eight, when William ruthlessly exposed his sister’s relationship with Scott. That was when I began warring between Scott and William.
Brown did incredible with keeping the suspicion running the show.
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Chill Factor – Was it Really Published in 2005?
To get back to the point I had earlier… So, as far as I know, there have been like three big waves or surges of feminism movements. The latest starting in the 1990’s. I was shocked when I went back to find the original publication date. It was originally published in 2005! That’s fifteen years after the latest movement that is still running rampant to this day. However, Chill Factor, was written as if it were the middle of the 70’s or 80’s.
The men were incredibly disrespectful to all of the women. I am aware, small town – old mentality (I’ll touch on that too!). But Brown wrote Chill Factor as if it were in modern day 2005. I was still pretty young in 2005, but I didn’t think that disrespect was so severe then.
I could be wrong though. Research isn’t my thing. Maybe I have my dates wrong and am totally making you upset right now, reading this, because you have more knowledge around these things. However, if I had been blindly asked what year I would have suspected Chill Factor to have been published, I would have chosen something closer to 1993. Just saying.
Sexism drove Chill Factor only a little less than suspicion. I was just as driven to see justice come from a bada** Lilly Martin as I was to have the killer’s identity revealed!
Dutch and Sheriff Burton in Chill Factor’s Small Town Cleary, NC
Sheriff Burton. Oh boy, Sheriff Burton and his best buddy, Cleary’s very own athletic director and father to Scott – Dutch. Those two “men”. Boy, did they make me mad on every page they entered! Boasting about sexual encounters with every woman they could get their hands on.
And constantly reminiscing about the good ol’ days when they were star football athletes. When it was revealed that Dutch had sex with Millicent (the latest kidnapping victim) just to prove to his son that she was a whore? Oh…. I was ready to rip him out of the book!
And to top it off, when Dutch was proud to have forced steroids onto his son? His HIGH SCHOOL son who climbed a rope in the gym and let go without a mat to soften his fall so that he would break his legs all so he would be out from under the thumb of his father?
Bajeezus. What kind of father does that? And rubbing it all in his wife’s face? “You should consider yourself lucky to be married to a man of my stature!” Really?! She seemed pretty bada** until you came along, Dutch! She was a killer athlete herself who stood up to a**holes like yourself! Until you came along, and she married you and got pregnant and felt trapped in a loveless marriage to a prick!
Self Respect Earns Respect – Take a Stand Against Disrespect
How can any respectful man expect a woman to be lucky and happy with a cheating, selfish, arrogant and misogynistic a** who boasts to his buddies about having had sex more than once with his son’s girlfriend. Just to get her out of his life. That is all sorts of psychotic and messed up on a whole different level. No woman deserves that. No woman.
Sheriff Who?
Burton was truly psychotic too! He was so jealous and desperate that he tried killing four people, all to get to his EX-WIFE who was trapped in the cabin with another man. He was a respected detective in Atlanta, GA before coming to be the sheriff for Cleary, NC. Well, respected until he began drinking and pulled a gun on a thirteen-year-old. He was fired and tell me, Curious One, how does one go from being a drunk detective who almost killed a child to the chief of police in any town?
Aside from Jesse Stone (who is total bada** by the way!) I have never understood how that could be a probable future for someone with that history. And Burton was emotionally abusive to Lilly. Brown didn’t come out and say it, but how could he not have been? Just look at his history with her. His spiral began when their daughter died of cancer, whom he proceeded to blame on Lilly. Then spiraling even further down the alcoholic hole when her career began to blossom and his remained the same. He even hit her a time or two before she finally left him.
I am sad to admit that I was happy that he finally got killed before he could reach them in the cabin. He was told directly by his superior that Tierney wasn’t the killer at that point, and he proceeded to shoot at them in the helicopter like a psycho! And Dutch using his weakness and jealousy to get to Tierney and hopefully have him killed before it was revealed that he slept with Millicent and that she was pregnant. I mean. So many secrets! Big secrets!
Small Town Cleary is Destroyed by Gossip in Chill Factor
Chill Factor really hits home in a small-town environment. I spent my childhood in a mid-sized town (pop. 8,000) and my high school years in a small town (pop. 400). It was rough. If you had a secret and it was exposed, it undoubtedly travelled the entire breadth of the town like wildfire. Exposed on Monday? The whole town knew about it by Tuesday afternoon. It’s a rabid race. And people are unforgiving. Even if it was an innocent secret like being a victim of assault or witnessing a murder.
If your mother does drugs, then you are immediately a druggie by association. If you have a hard time in school, your younger siblings are cursed to live under that same notion. Even the opposite. If your older siblings are great at school and join in all the extracurricular activities, then you must live up to that standard. If you don’t, you are then immediately labeled as a troublemaker or lazy.
This is exactly what happened to Tierney. Cleary heard that he was wanted to answer some questions and like a wildfire after a drought, he was officially the killer and the men of the town gathered their guns and grouped up to hunt him down. They were ready to kill him. And he was wanted for questioning. Not wanted as a suspect. I could roll my eyes so hard they would stick in the back of my head!
The People of Chill Factor are the Same as Everywhere Else
I don’t know what it is about people, but they have this penchant for wanting bad things to happen so they can have an excuse to toe the line of morality. You can’t know how you will react to something that happens to you until it does. You might think that killing a bad man would make you feel good, but you don’t know that.
Killing is killing and even if it is a justified killing, it could rip your sanity to shreds until you come to terms with it. Don’t judge by actions. Judge by experience. No one’s experience is ever the same. Small-town mentality is a thing, and it can rip an innocent person apart in the blink of an eye.
Holding Out Until the Last Moment to Discover Who The Killer Is
In the end, Lilly realizes that Tierney was telling her the truth and that he was not the killer. He was an adventure writer, so his ability to hike the mountain and not get lost was understandable. His story is pretty sad. I’ll leave it to you to read about it, but to summarize, his daughter was the first victim. Tierney was spending all of his extra time exploring the mountain where she went missing, hoping to find where her body was buried.
He did. Tierney found the graves and was on his way back to town to report it when the blizzard hit, and his car wouldn’t start. He found the blue ribbon (the one from his daughters’ hair) which was the killer’s signature as well. That was why it was in the pocket of his backpack where Lilly discovered it and a pair of handcuffs, causing her to believe that he was the killer.
Tierney thankfully survived and was able to save Lilly’s life when the real killer was strangling her because she put the pieces together. It didn’t help that she was handcuffed to the counter. Anyways, the FBI comes in and helps save the day, getting Tierney to a hospital because he had been shot by Burton before Burton was shot and killed by one of the FBI guys.
Information Overload or Relief?
Kind of a convoluted mess! But it all makes sense too. I should have clued in on William earlier when we got a backstory into his family life. That was a blaring clue, in hindsight! Either way, Tierney and Lilly end up together and he tells her about his daughter and his past and why she didn’t have the same last name.
Annoyingly, the last sentence of Chill Factor was Lilly planning on revealing the fact that she was pregnant from the one time they slept together in the cabin. The day she found Millicent’s body in the shed.
Brown’s World
All-in-all, I enjoyed Chill Factor. Brown did a good job of hooking you in and I sat here and read it in two days! It was hard to put down. Factoring in all the things that made me mad emotionally to the hunt for the true identity of the killer, it was an amazing ride. Her world was just what I needed to escape from the shifters in the Wolf Night collection I am trying to get through!
Sandra Brown’s website is incredible too! It has interviews, book trailers, new releases and newsletters all in one place. Super easy to navigate as well, which makes sense, coming from a NY Times Best Selling Author seventy-one times! She donates to a handful of organizations and keeps active on Facebook and Twitter. Honestly, if you walk into any bookstore, she will be there. How did I miss her for so long?! She’s on every platform available to authors and I can’t even say with certainty if I have heard her name.
No matter, she’s on my list now and I will be looking into more of her recent works!
I hope you had a really good week, Curious One and that you keep on living the life you want to live. Make your passions a reality and keep your dreams coming true!
As for me…
…it’s time for another book…
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