Snowbound
by Blake Crouch
Review: A man, together with his daughter, embarks on a dangerous quest to search for his missing wife, taken from her car five years ago in the Arizona desert just north of the Mexican border as she returned home and not seen or heard from since, in Snowbound, a novel of suspense by Blake Crouch.
Will Innis fled his home the day after the police informed him that his wife's abandoned car was found along the side of an isolated highway in the Sonoran Desert. It was clear the police were going to arrest him for his presumed involvement in her disappearance and he wanted to protect his daughter, Devlin, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, from a life without both her parents. Five years later, now living in Colorado under an assumed name, an FBI agent, Kalyn Sharp, visits him ... not to arrest him, but to enlist his help in identifying a man thought to be involved. But when Kalyn kidnaps the man's wife and young son as leverage against the man, Will realizes too late that he's in too deep, involved not with an active FBI agent but a former one, whose sister was also taken in circumstances similar to those of Will's wife, and who is determined to use any means necessary to find her.
If readers can accept a number of improbable premises in Snowbound -- among them that an innocent man would believe he was about to be arrested for a potential crime for which no evidence exists or is even proffered to suggest that it is, indeed, a crime of any kind; that a man and his teenage daughter can, on a moment's notice, assume a new identity and escape the attention of authorities for five years; and that that same father would risk his daughter's life by taking her along on a dangerous mission with a rogue ex-FBI agent, and continue to do so even after the body count starts to rise -- if all this and much, much more can be conveniently overlooked, then they will be rewarded with an exciting adventure that, about midway through, takes the characters to a remote region of Alaska. Isolated areas are always good for suspense. The unknown factors surrounding the disappearance of the women and the uncertainty associated with who's telling the truth and who isn't keep the interest level relatively high, and though how it all plays out is rather predictable, there's still a twist or two in the end that may come as a surprise.
Acknowledgment: Minotaur Books provided a copy of Snowbound for this review.
Review Copyright © 2010 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …
Abandon
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), July 2009
ISBN-13: 9780312537401; ISBN-10: 0312537409
Location(s) referenced in Snowbound: Arizona, Colorado, Alaska
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Snowbound by Blake Crouch
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0-312-42573-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42573-9
Publication Date: June 2010
List Price: $25.99
Synopsis (from the publisher): For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.
Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.
When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.”
Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska, heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.