In 2005, my husband Gary and I were living in Houston, Texas, not far from the upscale area where Bob and Char Hoovestahl live in the book. New Orleans was an easy daytrip for music and great food, and it was a convenient stop just on the way to my sister’s house in Lake Mary, Florida. I was familiar with the small towns, swamps, and fruit markets off the I-10 exits. In the early morning hours of August 29, I worried for the people living close to the shore. I admit, I was among those who blew off warnings about the mass destruction of New Orleans. I didn’t think about that. It was unthinkable.
Story vampire that I am, I watched the catastrophe evolve thinking I might have to find a way to use it in a book someday. I’d never written anything in the thriller genre, but I’d thought about it. One of my critique mates, Colleen Thompson, is a master of romantic suspense. I learned a lot about procedural structure from her standalone thrillers, The Salt Maiden and Fatal Error, specifically the core craft values of atmosphere, plot-driven character arcs, and blow-by-blow action scenes. I was ready to try my hand, just waiting for the right story to hit me.
In the wake of the storm, Gary and I volunteered with Operation Compassion, an interfaith effort to receive, assist, feed, and house hundreds of thousands of storm survivors who flooded into Houston. Downtown at Reliant Center, I cleaned bathrooms, served food, and hauled ice and beverages up and down the long lines of people deboarding buses and waiting for hours in the oppressive heat to fill out FEMA paperwork. It was a privilege to meet people in this extraordinary moment. The air was thick with humidity and stories, and I felt myself doing what a robin does when it’s building a nest—gathering a thread here and a twig there, weaving it into a place where I might create something. When I heard a weary New Orleans police officer comment, “This is great for media people and con artists,” the story hammer dropped.
I went home sunburned crawfish red and exhausted to the bone, but the characters had come for me. Corbin, Shay, and Queen Mab grabbed my hands and dragged me into the swampy mist. I sat up writing until dawn, napped for a few hours, and then went back to Reliant Center to keep doing whatever I could do to help. The skeleton of the story quickly took shape in my head, but I didn’t have time to do more than sketch out a few scenes. Just four weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita screamed into the Gulf, headed straight for Houston, and I realized a much larger story was yet to unfold.
Gary and I sheltered in place, following zoned recommendations, and we watched in horror as almost everyone else in our neighborhood panicked and bugged out. The hurricane veered off and lost a lot of spin before it landed, but the Houston metroplex was engulfed in a 200-mile-wide traffic jam—fact far crazier than any fiction I could have conjured—so, of course, that became a plot point that rewrote the ending I had planned. We experienced the remnants of Rita as a violent summer storm and sat without power for a few days. I recharged my laptop in my car and kept writing.
That winter, I was hip deep in a celebrity ghostwriting project, and the following year, my third novel went into the pipeline at HarperCollins, so I couldn’t give The Hurricane Lover the undivided attention it takes to finish a novel, but this turned out to be a good thing. I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the true extent of the research that would be needed to give this book the depth I wanted it to have. I didn’t even think about the documents that might later be released via the Freedom of Information Act, not the least of which turned out to be a thousand pages of email sent and received by Michael Brown in the days immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina.
For two years, while I wrote and published three other books, I continued gathering threads and twigs. I interviewed meteorologists, homicide detectives, an internist, an arborist, an architectural historian, plumbers, contractors, and many storm survivors from various walks of life. I watched with keen interest as New Orleans dragged herself out of the mud. I pored over thousands of weather bulletins, storm forecasts, government documents, and police reports and waded through a dense swamp of FEMA email and media releases.
The research was heartbreaking. Infuriating.
So much suffering could have been prevented, and so little had been learned from it in the years since. The blue vs red ideological divide had cost thousands of lives. Rather than embrace unity and common sense, people trenched down into whichever we the people they identified with, and in the South, that boundary was starkly color coded. The story became more layered. I relished the idea of a book club uncorking a bottle of wine and taking on these issues, gloves off.
The book was still missing one pivotal character: the storm. I tried again and again to draft the passages in which Shay and Corbin make their way through the eyewall. It just felt like a lot of words describing what I thought it might be like. What did it smell like? What was the strata of sound beneath the screaming wind? How does a hurricane feel on your skin? I needed to know. In September 2008, I had the opportunity to find out.
Hurricane Ike fulfilled all the dire predictions made before Hurricane Rita (lacking the one dire prediction that mattered.) When the call for evacuation came out, Gary and I made the decision to shelter in place. Gary, still an airline mechanic at the time, knew he’d be needed at the airport immediately after the storm, and we feared our elderly dogs wouldn’t do well away from home.
As Bonnie and Corbin do in the book, we filled the garage freezer with gallon jugs of water and stocked the pantry with batteries, protein bars, and other storm supplies. The eye of the hurricane made landfall in Galveston as a Cat 2 and moved inland along the east side of Houston. I watched CNN until the power went out, and then I sat in the garage on an Adirondack chair tucked in the back corner between my car and the chest freezer. Clutching a Maglite, I listened to the car radio and snacked on Sun Chips and homemade vegetable juice.
Beyond the open garage door, there was utter darkness cut by frequent lightning. I waited until the storm escalated to what I thought might be the eyewall. Then I strapped my son’s bike helmet on my head and went out into the street. My plan was to walk through the park across the street, but the towering pine trees that surrounded the playground were casting off branches and cones. In the strobe effect of the lightning, I could see that the air above the playground was filled with projectiles. Best to stay in the street, I decided. Walk around the block and call it good.
I pushed to the end of the driveway and sloshed through ankle-deep water gushing up from the gutter drains. I tried to turn my face away from the scouring rain, but it seemed to be coming from every direction. Bits of bark and God knows what drummed on the bike helmet. I felt weightless and weak, gasping for breath, pushing one step at a time against the force of the wind. Two or three houses down, I accepted the fact that this whole idea was incredibly stupid, and I turned back, fighting to keep my balance. The half block back to my house felt like a mile.
A few yards from the end of my driveway, I heard what sounded like the crack of a rifle. A large limb from a tall pecan tree smashed to the ground, and then another limb, and another until the whole tree gave in, like an umbrella closing. A towering oak that loomed over our front yard moaned and flailed. This tree brayed like a wounded animal, its wide trunk bending to an extent I wouldn’t have believed possible. I scurried back to my Adirondack chair and sat, shivering and giddy, trying to find words for what I’d experienced.
The storm was everything I had imagined: razorblade rain, pelting debris, body slam wind, galactic noise, the peculiar smell of ozone and wet cement. What I hadn’t anticipated was how deeply, viscerally frightening it would be. I expected to feel small; I did not expect to feel swallowed. I didn’t know the storm would be as present within me as it was around me, in the ringing of my ears, the hammering of my heart, and a resounding pressure that seemed to push the plates of my skull apart. This was not the green-eyed summer storm of my childhood; this was the jackboot of a jealous god.
Hurricane Ike decimated Galveston. On the real-life beach where I’d placed Billy’s bar and Shay’s fictional sanctuary, only one home was left standing. Houston’s infrastructure was crippled. In our neighborhood, far from the worst of the destruction, I’d say at least half of the big trees came down. The corner of our front porch was torn away, and our back deck and pergola were reduced to rubble. Miraculously, the old oak was still standing, but we lost three pecan trees. I hate the tall privacy fences that hash up every Houston neighborhood, so it gave me a modicum of mean pleasure to see 90% of them flattened, an apt metaphor for our common plight.
The postapocalyptic suburb was a ghost town. It was almost eight weeks before power was fully restored. Our generous neighbors, George and Toni, invited us to string a series of orange extension cords over to their generator so we could plug in the refrigerator and one lamp. By day, I conducted a guerrilla book mobile from the back of my yellow VW Bug, supplying books to the neighborhood kids and folks waiting in the long gas lines. By night, I unplugged the fridge and plugged in my computer, in the zone, fleshing out a finished draft of The Hurricane Lover.
I didn’t rush to publish. I wasn’t willing to make the compromises I knew I’d have to make if I put it into the mainstream publishing pipeline. Massive shifts in the publishing business model were making it possible to self-publish on a level we’d never seen in the industry. When I finally pulled the trigger on November 11, 2011, I had resources I couldn’t have imagined in 2005 when I started writing this book. During its first year, the ebook was downloaded more than 90,000 times—more than the combined total sales of my first three novels.
In 2021, my 33rd book, a celebrity ghostwriting project, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, but I can honestly say that The Hurricane Lover still feels like the greatest success of my career thus far. It was a soul project that demanded a lot from me and asks a lot of the reader. The message beneath the mystery is more relevant than ever. Our political divide has deepened to a seemingly uncrossable chasm as disinformation and fascism find new footholds in our country. The warnings of climate scientists are still largely unheeded. Even those of us who are willing to accept the enormity of the situation are daunted by the mandate for significant changes in the average American consumer’s voracious way of life.
In 2017, as Gary prepared to retire, we decided to move from Houston to our vacation place on the beach in Washington State. Gary’s supervisor at the airline kept asking him to stay a little longer, so we put off the move again and again. I started having a strange recurring dream in which my mother, who had died a few years before, was jamming my things into big boxes, telling me, “Hurry! You need to go now.” It was unsettling enough that I finally told Gary, “I’m going to Westport. You can catch up with me when you’re ready.” He agreed to put through the paperwork so we could leave together the first week of August.
I spent weeks downsizing, digitizing important papers and family photos, purging clutter. I packed up the furniture and belongings we really cared about, securing them for storage with plans to ship everything in a month or so. We took only a few things with us: a strongbox of important documents, my mother’s ukulele, several pieces of art that we didn’t want handled by movers, and two small suitcases with clothes for the road trip.
We arrived at our home on the Pacific Coast on August 19, 2017. On August 26, Hurricane Harvey, a catastrophic Cat 4 megastorm, swept the Gulf Coast. Our home in Houston was flooded to the ceiling.
I sat on the beach 2,500 miles away, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, weeping for our dear friends and neighbors who’d lost their homes and for the music venues, art galleries, and historic structures in this beautiful city we had loved and lived in for 23 years. I thought about the river of filth and debris that Shay waded through as the sun went down on the ruined city of New Orleans. That same river flowed through Houston now, and as far as I knew, all the belongings we’d so carefully put into storage were part of it.
But we were not.
We’d made the decision to step away from the city and lead a different kind of life. It was a big change, but people are capable of big changes when we choose to be. And change happens, whether we choose it or not. Change comes, catalyzed by decision or rained down by fate, an unstoppable force of nature that floats away the wooden chairs and garden gnomes, robbing us of our clutter, leaving us shaken but wiser.
The Hurricane Lover is available in paperback and ebook at your favorite book retailer.
