The Weatherman

I don’t have any new books to review right now so it’s back to ones I picked up second hand.

The Weatherman
© 1995 by Steve Thayer

ISBN: 0-451-18438-6
Publisher: Signet, the Penguin Group

410 pp.

About the book: “Andrea Labore is a beautiful, ambitious Twin Cities TV newscaster, hungering for an anchor chair, and with two men hungering for her. One is Rick Beanblossom, a star reporter who hides his disfigured face behind a cotton mask and his scarred soul behind a cynical shield. The other is the channel’s uncanny weatherman, Dixon Bell, a gentle bearlike genius whose claws are as concealed as his past.

 

When Andrea goes after the story of a serial killer of pretty young women, it becomes clear that the monstrous murderer is after her. Trusting the wrong man with her love can cost her life. And as the clouds of suspicion darken, the only sure forecast is that death will strike like lightning again and again…closer and closer…”

This book has an interesting and different plot. The killer strikes young women once per season usually around the time of a big storm or weather change. The press starts calling him the Calendar Killer. The only clues are a partial fingerprint and size 14 shoe prints so the police are baffled. The characters in the book were unusual, too, with Rick Beanblossom wearing a blue cotton mask all the time to cover burn scars suffered in Vietnam. He surrounds himself with beautiful things but doesn’t have a mirror in his home. I kept thinking of the Blue Man Group. Can you imagine being like that ALL the time? And Dixon Bell is never wrong with his weather forecasts even when the National Weather Service disagrees. The author worked at a TV newsroom for 3 years to do research and does a great job describing what goes on behind the scenes. The book kept me guessing (wrongly) right up to the last few pages and I was totally surprised.

I picked this book up at a flea market.