Snowbound by Blake Crouch, a Mysterious Review.

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.

Abandon
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), July 2009
ISBN-13: 9780312537401; ISBN-10: 0312537409

Pines
Thomas & Mercer (Trade Paperback), August 2012
ISBN-13: 9781612183954; ISBN-10: 1612183956