Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is  Books with Weather Events in the Title/on the Cover. A list of titles with weather-related words in them like storm, rain, blizzard, flood, lightning, hail, snow, wind, etc. OR covers with lightning/storms in the picture.

I’ve chosen books with weather events in the titles and on the covers. All but one are books I’ve read and enjoyed.The links go to my posts on the books.

Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves, the fourth in her Shetland Island Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set on Fair Isle, his home island. With the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Perez investigates a murder at the Bird Observatory.

The Body in the Ice by A J Mackenzie, the 2nd Hardcastle and Chaytor Mystery set in Romney Marsh and the surrounding countryside in 1796-7 when the winter was exceptionally harsh and cold and on Christmas Day a body is found, frozen in a pond. There’s no modern technology, just old-fashioned crime detection and deduction and a certain amount of intuition.

By Sword and Storm by Margaret Skea, the third book in the Munro Saga. It’s historical fiction set in 1598 when Adam Munro and his family were living in France as the French Wars of Religion drew to an end. Adam is a colonel  in the Scots Gardes, an elite Scottish regiment whose duties included the provision of a personal bodyguard to the French King, Henri IV.

The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble, a novel exploring the ending of life, and the nature of ageing, centring around Fran Stubbs, and set against a backdrop of rising floods in Britain and in the Canaries. It looks at the effects of the influx of immigrants arriving by boat to the Canaries from Africa and of the effect of the tremor off the small Canary Island of El Hierro on the tides.

A Deadly Thaw by Sarah Ward, the second in the Francis Sadler series set in the fictional town of Bampton in Derbyshire. In 2004 Lena Fisher was arrested for suffocating her husband, Andrew. In 2016, a year after Lena’s release from prison, Andrew was found dead in a disused mortuary.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell. A novel set in July 1976 when London is in the grip of a heatwave. (It was not just London, because I remember it very well where I was living in Cheshire in the north-west.) Gretta’s husband pops out of the house to buy a newspaper – but he doesn’t come back – this is a story of a family in crisis.

The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson, Nordic Noir. Jonasson’s writing brings the scenery and the weather to life – you can feel the isolation and experience what it is like to be lost in a howling snowstorm. The emotional tension is brilliantly done too, the sense of despair, confusion and dread is almost unbearable. 

Rain by Melissa Harrison, a ‘meditation on the English landscape in wet weather.’ She describes four walks in the rain over four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.

The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves, the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. It’s set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. Vera and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on the island. 

Snowblind by Ragnar Jonasson, more Nordic Noir, set in the tiny town of Siglufjördur in Iceland, accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason, a rookie policeman, investigates the deaths of a young woman found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer who fell to his death in the local theatre. This is one of my TBRs.