I’ll confess: I’ve used weather as a plot device more times than I care to admit. Need a car run off the road? Make it rain. Need your characters trapped and helpless? Bring on the snow. I once set a Quinn & Costa thriller in Patagonia, Arizona, over Memorial Day weekend—hot, dusty, and miserable. The mining town mattered to the story. The weather was just window dressing. But sometimes weather isn’t background. Sometimes it’s a full-blooded character, raw and real. Man vs. Nature isn’t the subplot; it’s the core story. As a teenager, I didn’t understand that. Forced to read The Old Man and the Sea, I yawned my way through it, preferring the human drama of The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn. Nature? Boring. Rereading Hemingway as an adult hit me different. Beneath the allegory of its most famous quote: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” it’s also a brutal yet beautiful love letter to the sea. Which is, ultimately, our life. The world may be indifferent and without mercy, but it just is. It’s how we as a human being respond. We may struggle, but ultimately, life is about perseverance and the truth that failure doesn’t define you. That power shows up again and again when weather becomes antagonist. The Shining (the book, always the book) traps a family (willingly, at first) in the snowbound Overlook with no escape. Twister isn’t a movie without the tornadoes. Cliffhanger turns icy cliffs and howling wind into co-stars alongside Stallone’s mountain rescuers. And C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett series? (One of my favorite series.) Wyoming isn’t just the setting—it’s a force of nature itself. Wildfires, blizzards, ice, and impossible terrain don’t just complicate Pickett’s cases; they become part of them. You couldn’t put the game warden in the middle of San Diego and have the same story. I never saw myself as a “setting as character” writer. I’m character-driven by nature; place is usually secondary. Then I wrote North of Nowhere. A small plane shot down near Big Sky, Montana, with a blizzard rolling in. I had so much fun tormenting my characters with that storm that I immediately started hunting for the next weather-driven thriller. Whisper Creek began with a simple “what if.” I love true crime, especially the character work in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So I asked: What if a crew of thieves gets trapped by a savage storm? Why were they in the middle of nowhere farmland to begin with? What were they after—and from who? That spark led to the McKenna family: Ellen, a young widow fighting to save the generations-old family farm while raising four kids. The novel became a tribute to the stubborn, courageous pride of American farmers and the fierce strength of family. But none of it carries the same teeth without the storm that slams into northern Cooke County, Texas. Facing armed thieves is terrifying. Facing them while Mother Nature is trying to drown you is something else entirely. Roads disappear. Creeks become rivers. Cattle and crops hang in the balance. You can prepare, but you can never fully control what’s coming. The storm turns every decision into life or death. I have a small confession. I was midway through this book when the tragedy at Camp Mystic in Kerr County unfolded in July 2025. I’d written a scene with a character trapped in floodwaters. I couldn’t finish it. My son lives in San Antonio. I know that country well; I’ve visited often and set the Lucy Kincaid series there. The pain was too real. So I changed the scene. It’s still tense, still terrifying, but it doesn’t lean so heavily on real grief. Stories like this demand respect. Real people live through these storms. Real families don’t get to close the book and walk away. So Whisper Creek takes family plus a thieves plus a corrupt corporation and tosses them together with an unrelenting storm. Oh, and there’s a missing cat. Just to keep you on your toes. On a lighter note, as Phoenix exceeds a hundred degrees as summer hits full-force, I may just cue up Cliffhanger and let Stallone battle the mountains for me. Mr. Storm and Miss. Hurricane can stay on the page where they belong. ***
Missing‑person thrillers hit a sweet spot in our brains because they turn a simple question—where did they go?—into a full‑on mental adventure. From Dickens’ unfinished Edwin Drood to modern Tana French, the genre has always left a thread hanging, forcing us to keep searching. That open‑ended tension feels bigger than a standard murder case; it’s not just “who did it?” but “what really happened?” and that uncertainty fuels the story’s pull.
Our fascination isn’t new. Even ancient storytellers used tales of dangerous woods, poisonous mushrooms or roaming beasts to teach survival skills around the fire. Those early narratives wired our brains to treat story as a life‑saving tool, not just entertainment. When we follow a protagonist who vanishes, our mind simulates the hunt, the fear, the hope—almost as if we’re walking the same shadowy trail ourselves.
Neuroscience backs that up. As we read, the brain lights up the same pathways that fire when we actually experience the events. That’s why a character’s death can feel like a personal loss, and why we stay up late turning pages until the mystery resolves. The brain craves closure, but it also thrives on the tension of the unknown, turning each missing‑person plot into a virtual training ground for dealing with real‑world risks.
So the allure is both primal and modern: we’re hardwired to seek answers that could keep us alive, and today we satisfy that urge with fiction that lets us explore the dark, unsolved corners of life without ever leaving our couch. The mystery stays compelling because it taps directly into that ancient, survival‑focused storytelling circuit, making every disappearance feel like a puzzle we just have to solve.
Gregg Olsen’s latest nonfiction work follows the tragic murders of three women who worked together as a close‑knit group of sex workers in Spokane. Their names were Yolanda Sapp, Nickie Lowe and Kathy Brisbois, and each was found along the river over a span of years that stretched into two decades. The case went cold for twenty‑two years until a DNA breakthrough finally pointed to a man named Douglas Perry. The twist is that Perry later lived as Donna, adding a layer of complexity that Olsen didn’t want to simplify into a sensational headline.
What drives Olsen isn’t the gore of the crimes but the lives that orbit the events. He says his first true‑crime story was about a boy discovered in a Nebraska cornfield, a mystery that pushed him to chase every lead in person, even into communities without phones. That same relentless curiosity fuels his current book, where he spends time with the families, sifts through old police files, and tries to give voice to people who can’t speak for themselves. He’s less interested in the mechanics of the murders and more in the human stories that surround them—the mothers, the sisters, the friends, and even the perpetrator’s own painful background.
The book also includes an afterword from forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, whose expertise adds a scholarly perspective on why people commit such acts. Olsen admits he isn’t a psychologist, so he leans on her to frame the behavioral patterns without turning the narrative into speculation. He wants readers to see the victims as more than stereotypes, to understand the social margins they inhabited, and to consider how mental illness and abuse intersect with the tragedy.
In the end, Olsen hopes the story will spark empathy and conversation. He wants people to recognize that the women were more than the labels society placed on them, and that the perpetrator’s gender transition, while part of her personal story, doesn’t excuse the violence. The lingering question he leaves us with is how we might have intervened earlier, and what we can do to protect vulnerable people when the system looks away.
“Trains are relentless things, aren’t they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but trains go on just the same.”— The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie Crime fiction loves trains the way a pickpocket loves crowds. A train leaves the station, and the story is already in motion. No exits, no detours, only rails stretching ahead and a cast of characters hurtling through the night, harboring secrets and schemes. The confined spaces let us eavesdrop with impunity. A whispered murder plot, anyone? Strangers jostle in narrow corridors.
‘He’s gaslighting you,’ is surely a phrase we’ve all heard countless times in recent years. A disagreement, a difference of opinion, a misalignment in the way two people remember an event: it’s too easy now to slap the term ‘gaslighting’ onto our discomfort with being challenged, and the social media trend of finding victimhood in all exchanges that we don’t like doesn’t help. But true gaslighting exists, and is far more frightening than a one-off challenge to our version of events. Gaslighting is a psychological war of attrition.
CHAPTER TWO R I V E R 10:42 a.m. RIVER REYNOLDS HAD never seen water so black. From the sun deck of the yacht, the Atlantic Ocean looked like Onyx Ink, the newest color from her favorite nail polish line, Mineral Manicure: it was shiny and sleek as a raven’s feather, so smooth it looked fake. She squinted into the distance, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, but there were only the tiniest ripples in the ocean’s glassy surface, and all caused by their boat, like the bow was a knife, the ocean a cake.
More than three decades after 6-year-old Etan Patz went missing, police found a surprising suspect. "48 Hours" and correspondent Richard Schlesinger go inside the investigation. Is the haunting case finally over? (On July 21, 2025, a federal appeals court ruled that Pedro Hernandez must have a new trial or be released.
More than 3 decades after 6-year-old Etan Patz went missing, police found a surprising suspect. Is the haunting case finally over? "48 Hours" correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports. (On July 21, 2025, a federal appeals court ruled that Pedro Hernandez must have a new trial or be released.
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