by Marie-Luise Stromer

Created on: January 07, 2011   Last Updated: January 10, 2011

Adam Kindred, a British climatologist who’s worked in the USA for some years, comes back to his home country for  a job interview. Afterwards he has lunch and a man in the restaurant strikes up a conversation with him. When he leaves, Adam notices that he’s forgotten a folder. He finds the name Philip Wang on it and an address and decides to return it. When he gets to Wang’s apartment, however, he finds him lying on his bed with a bread knife sticking out of his side. Wang’s last rasped words are that Adam pull the knife out which he does, thus leaving his fingerprints on it and blood on his suit. When he gets back to his hotel, he encounters Wang’s killer there who saw him in the apartment and who wants to do him in, too, just to be on the safe side.

Thus endeth Adam’s life as he has known it for forty-something years. His only chance of survival is to run as fast as he can, drop out of society and go underground. From the little money he’s got in his wallet, he buys a sleeping bag and a cooker, then he hides in a piece of rough ground on the Embankment. Soon he finds out that not only Wang’s killer is after him but also the firm Wang worked for.

So Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller? The division  of literature into genres may seem picky. Why should an author be forced to stay within the boundaries  of a genre, follow rules that have been established over time? Of course, an author can write any way they want, but like it or not, the rules exist and if an author transcends or disregards them, they should create something striking which justifies the process. A thriller opens with a crime and moves on towards its solution usually at a fast pace. Protagonists, settings, background info, sub plots make a thriller more or less readable according to the skills of the author, but they should always serve the main idea and never take on a life of their own.

Adam Kindred is certainly an original character. I can’t remember ever reading about a climatologist specialised in influencing the behaviour of clouds wrongly accused of murder. His reduction to the bare essentials, a place to sleep and some edible grub, while trying to save his hide and at the same time trying to understand what’s going on at all fascinate the reader from the start. Yet, his being a climatologist is only interesting, it constitutes nothing to the cause, he could be a specialist  in dozens of other professions. What

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>