Category 7

What would you do if you could control the weather?

Would you try to restore the rain forests?

Would you bring nurturing rain to the deserts?

Or, would you try to rule the world? After all, if you can control the weather, you can bring the most horrendous storms anywhere you want. Draught, hurricane’s, tornadoes, whatever you want.

Carter Thompson has found out how to control the weather. Decades after leaving a government project directed at controlling the weather, he has the technology—he has developed the technology to control the weather. While initially he sets out to make the world a better place, somewhere along the way ego and the need to control the outcomes over rides all sense of proprietary and rightness. Driven to achieve his goals, his way, angered by President Benson’s attitude, Carter uses his technology to take a mild little storm named Simone and transforms her into a raging Category 7 hurricane. In a race against time, CIA meteorologist Jake Baxter and Thompson employee Kate Sherman try to bring the hurricane down before it not only destroys the east coast, but obliterates half of the east coast. Carter is determined to win and has some tricks up his sleeve that even his own, tight knit family, know nothing about.

Debut author Bill Evans’ CATEGORY 7 posits some incredibly interesting theories and concepts. Drawing on his own experience and expertise as an award winning meteorologist, Mr. Evans treats readers not only to a fast moving and intriguing story, he offers up a bit of free education regarding meteorology. The educational aspect is woven so intricately into the storyline that it isn’t until the last page readers will realize just how much they learned.

Told in a fashion akin to some of television’s suspense movies with datelines at the beginning of each chapter, Mr. Evans intersperses the action scenes with chapters that tell a story from a narrative perspective. This reviewer could almost hear the narrative portions spoken by one of her favorites, Charlton Heston, when those passages were presented.

There is a lot of drama to the story, with a number of characters dying, a few times in overly staged deaths. With some of the deaths, it seemed that the character had run his or her life and absent any other graceful way to send them on their way, they were killed off. The final outcome for Carter was disappointing for this reviewer because after all the damage he caused, I wanted him to suffer long and hard and to know it. His final outcome was almost anticlimactic.

The way CATEGORY 7 is written lends itself strongly towards a television movie and it is one that this reviewer would enjoy watching.

Pick it up for the story, stay for the various avenues it will take you down.

September 2007