Customer Reviews

Category 7

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

What would happen if a meglomaniac billionaire could control the weather and create a Category 7 hurricane and send it directly to NYC? This is the premise of the novel. Sounds great doesn't it? It could have been great, but not in the hands of Mr. Evans. What results is this extremely dull and muddled book. The eponymous hurricane appears only towards the end of the book, everything before that is a repetitive mishmash of forgetable characters going over and over the same material - is there a repeated weather pattern that shows indications of manmade interference. This novel has screenplay written all over it. Maybe the movie will be better

This book has the distinction of being both confusing and dull as dishwater at the same time. I quit reading it after 100 pages. I just did not care about any of the characters and the action was non-existent.

I ordered this book the first day I heard about it!! I love thrillers and I love Bill Evans doing the weather. What Bill can't do is write novels. This was really POOR! The writing was terrible and the story was weak, confused and confusing. It seemed that Bill and his co-author had just taken a course in the use of adjectives. The chapters written in italics( inside the mind of Simone) were almost laughable. example: "The Hudson and East rivers, between which Manhattan usually nestled in insouciant comfort, swelled and pushed brackish tidal water and its effluvia farther north than it had ever been, sloshing over real estate considered more valuable for its view than its ability to drain." WHAT? Here's another one:" The filty surge blocked their escape as it pushed against doors that needed to be pulled, turned wide hallways into flash-flooding rivers, and transformed broad, banistered staircases into ravaging, sucking cataracts."
Also, what happened to Elle? Can anyone tell me that? Did I fall asleep reading this boring book and miss the part where she was injured? She was out with Davis Lee. End of chapter. Next time we meet up with her she is waking up with "raw, bloody fingertips' What did I miss?
Very weak characters and character development. HUGE leap from people seeing unusual storms to a crazy man manipulating the weather. And, seriously, I didn't like the constant references to 9/11. Not appropriate.
Really bad book.

I saw the author on GMA with Sam Champion and the premise of this book was spectacular - what if a monster hurricane hit New York City?? There is no where to go that would be safe and it would create disaster wherever it went.
So I bought it - well, I was on page 230 or so asking when are the fireworks going to start?? There are some book review sites that have a '50 page rule', in other words, if a book doesn't grab you in 50 pages, forgetaboutit! Well, I hung in for the long haul and when the storm finally gets close to New York and the 2 Kate and Jake get together to see what to do to stop the storm does anything pop. The only good part before this is - through the book was the description of how the hurricane forms and churns in little snippets through the book, and that was excellent - then back to the mundane character developement.
Do you like the characters? no. I have only given up on 1 book in my reading and this was nearly number 2 -
If you like a book to build slooooooowly, go for it.
I would not buy another book from Evans if this is an indication of his style.
Seeing the other reviews that really love this book, maybe it was me, but I follow and pay for the books of over 40 authors, and I want to know my $$ are spent well.
This was not my thing.
But you may well enjoy it.
Just be aware - action is way down the list - character developement is the main thing, and then it is very slowly done on each character.

Meteorologists especially those working The National Hurricane Center of NOAA are fascinated and frightened by the most powerful storm ever recorded, Hurricane Simone, much more powerful than anything before. The weather experts extrapolate its force as being equivalent to Category 7 when 5 and 4 are compared. The coastal cities are being evacuated by panicking people caught in traffic jams that are endless. New York City is a microcosm of what is anticipated as it lies in a direct path which will leave Manhattan devastated especially the southern tip and Long Island totally under water.

US President Winslow Benson feels helpless as there is little he can do except help get people out of the anticipated flood zone. He knows Simone was created by former wealthy idealist Carter Thompson, who once dreamed of feeding the world, but now feels he owes Benson and those who ridiculed him a taste of what wind and rain can wrought. Former Thompson team member meteorologist scientist Kate Sherman and CIA meteorologist Jake Baxter are the only hope to save the East Coast, but their Hail Mary must occur inside the eye of the hurricane.

This exciting thriller hooks the audience although the cast of thousands slows down the superstar Simone. The scientific premise behind the story line seems plausible and is easy to understand as Bill Evans and Mariana Jameson incorporate what caused Simone within the story line. Weather Channel fanatics will full appreciate CATEGORY 7 as the two meteorologists struggle to prevent the ultimate act of terrorism, controlling the weather.

Harriet Klausner

The concept is interesting, but the execution of the novel felt weak. The characters aren't very memorable and the description of the storm is not as detailed as one would imagine a book like this would give. It does have the feeling of a weather forecasters report - short and somewhat shallow. Good first try, but not the best of reads.

I was excited to read this book after reading the reviews, but this book is slow and disjointed. Not only is the protagonist a confusing mix of too many people, the connections between the characters are disjointed.
Waiting for the book to end was worse than sitting out a hurricane, it just goes on and on.

I love disaster books, so I was excited to see this one. I liked that he took a chance, and the hurricane actually hit. But more attention should have been paid to that part of the book. It's not every day NYC icons topple, but it's barely a whisper in this story. What makes a disaster book great is how the main characters and the public inside the story deal with things during and after the event. We didn't get to see any of that.

Everyone seems kind of angry that its not a completely natural hurricane, but frankly, I can see this happening. In this political climate, I can guarantee SOMEONE out there is right now trying to pull this off to prove their point about global warming. That's truly terrifying.

As an aside, can ANYONE please tell me what happened to Elle? I mean, seriously, it seemed like there were whole chapters just edited out of her storyline. Right smack in the middle. He took on a few too many characters and didn't have the time to flesh them out.

But, still, a good beach type read. Nice effort. :-)

Having just finished this novel, I thought I'd pop onto Amazon to see what some critics and many readers had to say. I'm pretty dumbstruck by the extremes here, so many giving "Category 7" one star, so many others giving it five. The truth, of course, lies somewhere firmly in between. What follows here will confirm or refute much of what has been said before me. I won't rehash the plot details, as that can be found elsewhere among these customer reviews.

To begin with, all those who say they couldn't get past the first 50 or 75 pages have a point. The number of major characters which Evans and Jameson attempt to manage here would have given Dickens a run for his money (except that, unlike these two, Dickens would have made it worth wading through, I'm sure). Rather than fully realize any one of their nine or ten major players and plot threads, they effectively realize none of them until some two hundred pages into the novel. If you make it through to that point, there are some interesting characters and relationships which develop. I'm not trying to be a wiseguy when I say, I truly enjoyed pages 225 through 340 of this 384 page book! That's about the range where there was payoff to be had. Up to then, it was simply work (much of it dull and frustrating) and after that, there was a distinct lack of payoff.

My strongest caution to anyone who would consider investing time or money into this novel would be to know what you're getting into. Judging by the cover, the preliminary critical reviews and my knowledge of Bill Evans as our local NYC weatherman, I expected at least some measure of the human drama which makes disaster stories so compelling. There's none of that here. Zip, zero. There's lots of Science, both real and highly dubious--a geek's delight, perhaps, but not what most of us read novels for. There's tons of political intrigue, though this too has been done much better, and much more convincingly, by others (if you want Tom Clancy, read Tom Clancy). But where is the New York City that this novel promises? I wanted the guy who runs the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island watching the biggest wave in history coming his way; instead, I got a lot of highly-mannered CIA agents making a lot of highly-mannered threats and maneuvers. Outside of a few references to Gerritsen Beach and the standard shot of the Statue of Liberty being sucked under the waves (have these writers never heard of a cliché?) this novel might have been co-written by someone who'd never even been to New York, let alone someone who calls himself New York's Hometown Weatherman!

I suppose I wanted to write this review because I was disappointed by this novel, and no customer review I found here seemed to articulate that disappointment. It's not an awful book, but it could have been so much more. Even if it hadn't met my expectations of being a novel about New York City in the context of a hurricane, it could have been a terrific novel about a pair of experimental meteorologists, one good (Richard), one evil (Carter), former friends who chose different paths, leading to the ultimate showdown in the sky. As it is, "Category 7" tries to tell this story within a mish-mosh of other, less appealing characters and threads--so many so, that the best of what's here gets washed away like so much debris in a flood.

It is always fun watching a new author branch out and take their first little baby steps into novels - and as a reader it can be very rewarding seeing a great writer find his stride.

In this case however: Baby fall down - Go Boom!

This "disaster" novel is nothing of the sort. There is nothing wrong with taking up two thirds of a disaster book by concentrating on the characters and building suspense - but the problem here is that the characters are not especially likable (dull) and the disaster (when it comes, better than 250 or so pages in) ain't all that much.

One of the main problems is that the author, a TV weatherman, loads his book down with obscure weather industry related terms that Joe Average won't follow without difficulty - or even care about past page nine.

Add to that a CIA weatherman (?) and others in the weather related field (Which the author appears to try to build up as the most important entity on the planet) - who as characters are all bland at best, a villian who is a cardboard cutout and page upon page upon chapter where literally nothing happens but weather tech speak.... (Zzzzzzzzzz)

Sorry but I don't care for close to three hundred pages of tech cardboard followed by a limp disaster.

Avoid unless you want to be a weatherman. I gave it one star only because I had to.