I really like
T. Jefferson Parker. He's a damn good writer who keeps getting better and better. But his novels are starting to bug me. The last book of his that I reviewed,
The Fallen, featured a cop who survived a fall from a tall building. I noted that this reminded me of a previous book about a sympathetic character,
Silent Joe, which featured a cop who was disfigured. So what happens in
Storm Runners? Parker comes right back with a cop turned private investigator who survived a bomb blast and lost an eye and finger, among other injuries. Parker pet peeve aside, this is another really good book. In the first sentence, Parker establishes that a high school friend killed lead character Matt Stromsoe's wife and young child. From there, the tale unfolds and you can probably figure out the direction in which things are headed. In keeping with the title, one of the interesting topics in the book is meteorology, as Stromsoe's romantic interest is a TV weather forecaster whose hobby and life's work is cloud seeding or making it rain, as Pacman Jones would say.
(While reading about the rainmaking, I couldn't help but remember a book I read as a kid,
The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, which was written in the late 1960's and was well before its time. In that book, a bunch of teenagers used rockets filled with chemicals to make it rain in their town, which was having a drought. In Storm Runners, a similar fate happens once the characters mess with Mother Nature.) Another interesting topic in the book is the Mexican Mafia and ways they are able to communicate with their leader, who is serving time in prison. (Harvard won't be too happy that the vicious leader of
La Eme is a graduate of their school.) Even though there are more similarities and less originality than I prefer in a book, I enjoyed
Storm Runners. With that said, I hope Parker returns to a more normal lead character in his next novel.
