I’ll confess: I’ve used weather as a plot device more times than I care to admit. Need a car run off the road? Make it rain. Need your characters trapped and helpless? Bring on the snow. I once set a Quinn & Costa thriller in Patagonia, Arizona, over Memorial Day weekend—hot, dusty, and miserable. The mining town mattered to the story. The weather was just window dressing.
But sometimes weather isn’t background. Sometimes it’s a full-blooded character, raw and real. Man vs. Nature isn’t the subplot; it’s the core story.
As a teenager, I didn’t understand that. Forced to read The Old Man and the Sea, I yawned my way through it, preferring the human drama of The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn. Nature? Boring.
Rereading Hemingway as an adult hit me different. Beneath the allegory of its most famous quote: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” it’s also a brutal yet beautiful love letter to the sea. Which is, ultimately, our life. The world may be indifferent and without mercy, but it just is. It’s how we as a human being respond. We may struggle, but ultimately, life is about perseverance and the truth that failure doesn’t define you.
That power shows up again and again when weather becomes antagonist.
The Shining (the book, always the book) traps a family (willingly, at first) in the snowbound Overlook with no escape. Twister isn’t a movie without the tornadoes. Cliffhanger turns icy cliffs and howling wind into co-stars alongside Stallone’s mountain rescuers.
And C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett series? (One of my favorite series.) Wyoming isn’t just the setting—it’s a force of nature itself. Wildfires, blizzards, ice, and impossible terrain don’t just complicate Pickett’s cases; they become part of them.
You couldn’t put the game warden in the middle of San Diego and have the same story.
I never saw myself as a “setting as character” writer. I’m character-driven by nature; place is usually secondary. Then I wrote North of Nowhere. A small plane shot down near Big Sky, Montana, with a blizzard rolling in. I had so much fun tormenting my characters with that storm that I immediately started hunting for the next weather-driven thriller.
Whisper Creek began with a simple “what if.”
I love true crime, especially the character work in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So I asked: What if a crew of thieves gets trapped by a savage storm? Why were they in the middle of nowhere farmland to begin with? What were they after—and from who?
That spark led to the McKenna family: Ellen, a young widow fighting to save the generations-old family farm while raising four kids. The novel became a tribute to the stubborn, courageous pride of American farmers and the fierce strength of family. But none of it carries the same teeth without the storm that slams into northern Cooke County, Texas.
Facing armed thieves is terrifying. Facing them while Mother Nature is trying to drown you is something else entirely. Roads disappear. Creeks become rivers. Cattle and crops hang in the balance. You can prepare, but you can never fully control what’s coming. The storm turns every decision into life or death.
I have a small confession. I was midway through this book when the tragedy at Camp Mystic in Kerr County unfolded in July 2025. I’d written a scene with a character trapped in floodwaters. I couldn’t finish it. My son lives in San Antonio. I know that country well; I’ve visited often and set the Lucy Kincaid series there. The pain was too real.
So I changed the scene. It’s still tense, still terrifying, but it doesn’t lean so heavily on real grief.
Stories like this demand respect. Real people live through these storms. Real families don’t get to close the book and walk away.
So Whisper Creek takes family plus a thieves plus a corrupt corporation and tosses them together with an unrelenting storm.
Oh, and there’s a missing cat. Just to keep you on your toes.
On a lighter note, as Phoenix exceeds a hundred degrees as summer hits full-force, I may just cue up Cliffhanger and let Stallone battle the mountains for me.
Mr. Storm and Miss. Hurricane can stay on the page where they belong.
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