cover image Distant Thunder

Distant Thunder

Nick Casto. Burd Street Press, $24.95 (276pp) ISBN 978-0-942597-83-7

Casto imagines the weather as a war weapon and produces an all-action first novel as lively-and as vacuous-as a Stallone flick. The plot bursts open in the middle of a tornado touchdown in Norman, Okla., as Kevin Mercer, senior field meteorologist with the National Severe Storm Laboratory, his tyro assistant and a farmer scramble for safety under a bridge. Before too long, Kevin is hauled off to D.C. by the DEA and the president, who want him to helicopter secretly into the jungles of Cuba and wipe out hidden drug factories with a new weapon, Thor, that uses a laser beam from a space station to stir up electrical forces that generate lightning. At times the narrative sizzles, as when Kevin and his jungle team guide lightning bolts into drug factories. But too much of the novel takes place back in Norman, where Kevin's flame, TV reporter Susan McDonald, is pursued by thugs in a lackluster subplot, and in D.C., where the president and his DEA crew track a congressman with ties to the Cuban drug business. There's plenty of bravado here-but nearly every sentence sounds as if you've read it a hundred times before. (Apr.)