CLINT MCCOWN, The Weatherman

Wisconsin author McCown follows up his previous War Memorials with this marvelously sardonic satire of seat-of-the-pants, renegade journalism. As a boy in Alabama, Taylor Wakefield watches his no-count cousin commit a murder—and then later suffers a humiliating defeat in the National Spelling Bee by screwing up the word “responsibility.” When, years later, his cousin accuses an innocent man of the killing he’s responsible for, Taylor’s long-suppressed moral outrage finally erupts, and he uses his meager position as a forecaster on a small, syndicated TV station in Birmingham to try to subtly clue in his viewers to the truth. Available September 1