A good novel depends on a balance between three fundamental forces: the plot, the characters, and the writing [2]. You can get away with iffy writing if you've got a stellar plot and engrossing characters [3]. If you're no good with characters, you can make up for it with a gripping plot told well [4]. And if your plot is vague or nonexistent, you can get a lot of milage out of interesting characters interacting in amusing ways [5].

You can't really fail at two of those things: a plot by itself is just an outline, characters by themselves are just character studies, and good writing may serve well as poetry, but it can't be the one thing holding a book up. You need at least two of these things, and it's better with all three.

Before this, the Prey books had all three. The writing, while not as poetic or florid as some, certainly has enough sheer craftsmanship behind it to carry a book. All of the plots have been engaging, and the bland characters have been few or far-between.

This novel is different. The writing style is good enough, of course — it's the same style as in the rest of the books [6] — but the plot is routine. A body is found, the clues are gathered, and eventually it leads to a final confrontation. In this case, the bad guy dies from falling off a tall building, something you usually only see in Hollywood movies [7].

There's no exotic setting or unusual environment. There's no raging winter, no sweltering summer, no long-forgotten woods or seedy urban slums. The Twin Cities is much like most of the other similarly-sized metro areas in America [8].

So that leaves the characters. And that's where we find Meaghan, who has enough character to fill the entire book. She is almost the only thing preventing the book from being a cookie-cutter thriller.

Meaghan is doomed from the outset: she's got cancer, and it's almost certainly terminal, and she's in a downward spiral for however long she has left [9]. Without her personal crusade, and the sense of a time limit that her condition imposes on the plot, the whole plot would just be a routine police investigation. Not even that, most likely.

While it's not technically the first time the author would place characters over plot, this is the first time where the characters really were setting the tone of the novel more than the setting or the plotline. And it wouldn't be the last time.

The author also spelled her name wrong for the entire book. In the initial hardcover and the paperbacks, it was spelled "Harkinnen". This mistake is absolutely his fault — it's not from some misplaced editing decision in New York or some simple search-and-replace editor. He just thought it was Harkinnen, and never checked in the previous book.

Well... okay, that happens sometimes. It's embarrassing for the author, and it's embarrassing for the editors [11], but it happens. But there's another question behind it, that has nothing to do with the mistake:

Where does the name Weather Karkinnen even come from? The number of people named Weather is probably quite low in America [12]. So wherefor Weather?

The answer is surprisingly simple for both her first and last name. The first name is the result of a writing trick: come up with a memorable name that's distinct, but not insane [13].

Think about it: the Prey series is set in Minnesota. Logically, something like 40% of the characters should have last names of Johnson, Peterson, Anderson [14]. And yet, the book has last names like Davenport, Sloan, Kruger, Capslock, Roux... nothing common, nothing realistic for the area, but distinct from each other and easily recognizable.

Similarly, look at the first names: Lucas, Harrison, Elle, Del, Rose Marie. Is anybody named John? Or Larry? Or Bob? The answer is yes, but those names are reserved for throwaway characters [15].

The first names can't be insane, but they can't be too common. The last names can be practically anything, as long as they're distinct from all the other names.

Therefore, Weather. It's an instantly recognizable word — everybody knows it — but you're not going to confuse her name with anyone else in the book. Same thing with her last name: Karkinnen is a valid Finnish name, or at least a close approximation thereof, but you're not going to run into many of them in the course of a novel [16].

The canon in-book explanation for her name is even there in Winter Prey. Weather says, of her father, "Mom says he was always talking about the weather — 'If the weather holds, if the weather turns.' Like that. So when I was born, they called me Weather." [17]

And really, I think most people know at least one person with a name stranger than Weather [18].

I have received a lot of mail from animal rights activists, complaining about the senseless killing of dogs and cats in the books. Obviously (these letters go) the author must actually be a depraved animal-hating psychopath to be able to write about it.

Author S.M. Stirling once said, "There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'."

The author does not condone animal cruelty in any sense. He is both a dog-lover and a cat-lover. His kids have six cats between them [19], and everyone in the entire extended family has an extraordinary empathy where animals are involved.

Yes, dogs and cats have been killed in Sandford books. The killings are done by extremely bad people, and the killings are used as examples of these extremely bad people being extremely bad people by virtue of doing extremely bad things [20].

The author has also written about murder, but does not murder people. Some of his characters have burned down houses, but the amount of actual arson in the family is quite low indeed [21]. There's a lot of sexual assault over the course the series, but it's zero with regard to the author and his family.

The books are fiction, and the killing of animals is, yes, a cheap literary trick. It is also an extremely effective literary trick. And after all that, what happens in the books is still orders of magnitude less horrible than a lot of the very real abuse that happens to real world animals. Please, please, stop attacking the author with the assumption that he's as bad as the extremely bad people he writes about, or you might just be the idiot that S.M. Stirling talked about.