Book Talk

Hurricane season and other disasters

Torrents of fiction have been arriving this month. The ever popular British author Ruth Rendell contributes The Water’s Lovely. Young Heather had discovered her step-father’s body floating in the bathtub. Nine years later with his mysterious death far behind them, Ismay’s repressed memories begin to resurface.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a place with no law, order or electricity. In the bleak aftermath of the storm, Sheriff’s Detective Dave Robicheaux is deployed to the city to track down some of the worst predators. James Lee Burke continues his popular Louisiana based series with The Tin Roof Blowdown.

Hurricane Katrina was a Category 4 when it made landfall, Simone is a Category 7 and she’s headed up the eastern seaboard towards New York City. In the novel by Bill Evans and Marianna Jameson, buildings will fall, subways will flood, people will flee and the storm has been created, not by nature but by a man out for revenge.

Of course any book by Patrick O’Brian must include an ocean and The Road to Samarcand starts on a sloop in the South China Sea. After barely surviving a typhoon, a teenaged orphan son of American missionaries, his seafaring uncle and an elderly English archaeologist are off to find ancient treasures in Central Asia.

Secretly released from Guantanamo Bay, five dangerous terrorists unleash terror attacks of Biblical proportions. Counterterrorism agent must find the source of the conspiracy in The First Commandment by Brad Thor.

Forensic geologist Em Hansen suspects that the cloud of dust blowing from Africa to the United States is not an act of nature and has sinister implications. Why else would the FBI be tracking it? Read Killer Dust by Sarah Andrews.

Joshua Clark, New Orleans resident and NPR correspondent, remained at home in the French Quarter during Hurricane Katrina. He immediately began to record interviews with those who stayed or were left behind. The result is Heart like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in its Disaster Zone.

In 1974 a record 148 tornadoes broke out in 13 states from Mississippi to Michigan. Six of those were F5, the most deadly. Big disasters are composed from small stories and Mark Levine tells of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation. F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century is a non-fiction book that reads like a thriller.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian