Weather Villains

by Jean Henry Mead

Severe weather can be a great antagonist in any genre, especially mysteries and all its subgrenres. I use weather often in my novels: pea soup fog, rain, blizzards. floods, tornadoes or high winds because weather creates drama and pits humans against nature.

In my novel, A Village Shattered, a San Joaquin Valley serial killer hides in tule fog, which is nearly opaque, and kills residents of a retirement village alphabetically. Two widows, Dana Logan and Sarah Cafferty, realize their names are on the killer's list and brave the fog to discover who in the village is killing their friends.

Diary of Murder begins in a Rocky Mountain blizzard while Dana Logan and her friend Sarah Cafferty are vacationing in Colorado and learn of Dana’s sister’s death. Her husband claims it was suicide but Dana knows better and drives their 37-foot RV through a storm, which no one in her right mind would attempt, but I wrote that scene from experience.

In Murder on the Interstate, Dana and Sarah discover the body of a young woman in her Mercedes convertible during a rainstorm in northern Arizona. Later, they’re caught in a flash flood in a rented Hummer while pursed by a serial killer during a severe downpour. They have to be rescued by helicopter but they’re still not out of the woods.

I can’t think of a villain much worse than Hurricane Irene, which threaned millions of residents of the Eastern seaboard and caused the deaths of two children.

Murder on the Interstate