By Alan Jacobson (Pocket Books, 2001)

If you’re looking for a real thriller, choose this one. Psychologist Dr. Lauren Chambers is disturbed when her husband, Mike, doesn’t return from a ski trip. She gets no help from the authorities who naturally assume Mike has been having an affair. Lauren enlists the aid of Nick Bradley, a private detective, and they set  out to find Mike. Trouble is that Mike has had an accident and has total amnesia.
That’s a pretty ordinary plot, and the book would be barely passable if that were all that it had going for it. But there’s a really nasty assassin who is recently out of prison and who has determined to kill Harper Payne, the only man who can witness against him in a new trial. Harper had been taken into the Witness Protection program, but scooted out from under the care of the U.S. Marshals, and everyone suspects that he is the current Mike Chambers.
To find Mike, the assassin sets his sights on Lauren and she endures some hellacious tortures. At one point she thinks, “Mike, what have you gotten me into?”
Even this much of the plot sounds fairly ordinary, but Jacobson skillfully throws in as many twists and turns as a West Virginia ‘short cut.’ It’s a veritable roller coaster ride of a read. One of Jacobson’s best writing traits is that he doesn’t throw in gratuitous sex scenes. The book is probably too violent to receive the Good Clean Book label, but it’s still ‘clean’ by contemporary standards.