A storm chaser who happened to end up in fiction.

Jerry Shields was fascinated by the 1985 Barrie tornado — not just the damage, but what could be learned from it, and how people behave in the onset stages of a disaster like that. He was already the kind of kid who built forts on his grandparents' farm just to watch storms roll through, and Barrie turned that fascination into a real question: what makes the difference between someone who gets out in time and someone who doesn't?

He studied meteorology at York University, expecting to end up at Environment Canada. A tour of a weather office changed his mind — rows of cubicles, a wall between the forecaster and the sky itself. Jerry wanted the wind gust before the storm, not a desk between him and it. So, to his parents' horror, he left school and spent the next twenty years outside in the weather, using his knowledge of it building and maintaining golf courses.

He was never far from the weather. Inspired by Twister, he started storm chasing across Northern Ontario in the late 1990s, and when the internet arrived, he built one of the region's first real-time weather sites, forecasting for Sault Ste. Marie and the Algoma region. A decade later, a tip from a friend led him to a contract forecasting for a provincial fire and flood emergency program. It became a career — Jerry was made permanent, rose to lead the province's emergency-management weather program, and earned a graduate diploma in operational meteorology from Mississippi State University along the way.

A family loss during those years — a parent gone too young — changed how Jerry and his wife, Jill, thought about time. Retirement isn't guaranteed, so they started living for now: cruising the world, filming their travels, and chasing the kind of places most people only see in postcards. It was on one of those trips, watching weather roll across an Alaskan landscape, that a character started taking shape in Jerry's head — a disaster meteorologist who went looking for the next emergency instead of waiting for it to find him. Jerry named him Nathan Discher: Nat, for natural, and Dis, for disaster.

Jerry doesn't think of himself as a writer in the traditional sense — he's someone whose mind doesn't turn off. He walks through the world seeing the disaster movie other people miss: the wrong-shaped cloud, the current that's just a little too fast, the moment right before something goes wrong.

Cleaver Reach is what happens when that never-ending reel finally got written down — the first book in the Nate Discher series, grounded in the real science of the disasters Jerry spent a career forecasting, and the restless curiosity that put him in the path of them in the first place.