Eric_W's Reviews > The Cold Kiss

Audiobook. A good thriller must have several things going for it to keep me entertained: I must care about one or more of the characters; I have to want to find out what happens in the end; and it has to be reasonably well written. If the characters are relatively normal people, i.e., don’t have the superhuman powers so common in some thrillers today, that's a plus. My crap-detector swings into overdrive when our hero manages to take on twelve bad guys with one six-shooter and gets all of them. Sometimes two criteria out of three works; sometimes not. Cold Kiss meets all three.

This book reminded me so much of A Simple Plan (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) by Scott Smith. Nate and his fiancé find themselves driving into a blizzard on their way to Reno to get married. At a rest stop they meet a man, obviously ill, who offers them $500 to drive him there also as his car needs some work. They agree but as the snow worsens they are forced to stop at a motel in the middle of nowhere with heat but no power. They discover the man has been shot, and, he has a suitcase full of money. One thing leads to another and soon the man is dead, the motel’s handyman is suspicious, the snow is worsening, and everyone is getting greedy.

Paul Michael Garcia reads with a laconic, slow tempo that drives the tension effectively.