March is often the snowiest month in the Centennial State. Remember the blizzard of 2021 that dumped nearly two feet of snow in just a couple of days? Weather impacts our daily lives, but sometimes it demands to be the main character. These books feature wet weather, rain and snow, as a major element of the story. Stay dry and take a read – water and books don’t mix.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. The famous Detective Hercule Poirot is vacationing when his train is stopped by a snowslide high in the Balkans. One traveler is found stabbed to death inside his locked compartment. Poirot must solve the case before anyone else gets hurt. Made into a movie in 1974 and again in 2017, this story is a mystery classic.

 

Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America’s Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900 by Al Roker. Roker documents the extreme devastation on Texas’s gulf coast. “On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed in Galveston, the booming port city. In less than 24 hours, a single storm destroyed a major American metropolis – and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature,” the book blurb states.

 

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson. Taking a different angle on the 1900 Galveston hurricane, Erik Larson uses original telegrams, letters and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes to build “a chronicle of one man’s heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude,” Goodreads explains. The story is centered around Isaac Cline, Galveston’s resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau, and his failure to imagine the ferocity of weather.

 

Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came by M.C. Beaton is book number 12 in the cozy mystery series featuring public relations genius and amateur detective Agatha. Set in the flooding English Cotswolds, Agatha finds a bride floating in the swollen river who is dead. Agatha’s hunch that not everything is as it seems festers as she works to solve the mystery.

 

Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It by Gabrielle Walker is nonfiction science writing, following “maverick scientist Paul Hoffman’s quest to prove a theory so audacious and profound that it is shaking the world of earth science to its core,” states the book blurb. Hoffman’s theory: that the earth was frozen pole to pole 700 million years ago, which triggered the Cambrian Explosion. Walker takes readers around the world looking at Hoffman’s evidence in a story full of “intellectual intrigue.”

 

The Wizard of Sun City: The Strange True Story of Charles Hatfield, the Rainmaker Who Drowned a City’s Dreams by Garry Jenkins. Garry Jenkins writes a biography of Charles Hatfield, a rainmaker who milked the skies in dry southern California in the early twentieth century. Hatfield was celebrated and his secret formula was sought around the world until San Diego catastrophically flooded.

 

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgshig Rice, is a post-apocalyptic novel set in northern Canada. The small Anishinaabe community loses power and is cut off from the outside world as winter approaches. The situation becomes more dire due to dwindling resources and refugees moving north, as Evan Whitesky becomes an unlikely hero, turning to the land and Anishinaabe traditions to survive.

 

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis is book one of the classic children’s series in The Chronicles of Narnia. Siblings Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan find themselves in a frozen magical land through the wardrobe door. They join forces with the lion Aslan on a great adventure to free Narnia from the White Witch’s eternal winter spell.

 

By Celeste McNeil; courtesy photos