GABI MEDEIROS, FBI AGENT, AD HOC STORM CHASER (character in Supercell)

Gabi Medeiros is a Special Agent with the FBI. Born of a Russian mother and Portuguese father, she’s attractive but not classically beautiful. As she once explained, “I gotta watch what I eat, or I get a little heavy in the ass and start looking like a female Michelin Man.”

Divorced and the veteran of several dead-end affairs, she’s come to the realization there’s a scarcity of men who want to settle down with a woman who “shoots guns, curses in Russian and can’t cook worth a damn.”

Working out of the Oklahoma City Field Office, she develops a hypothesis that someone is using tornado damage as a cover to loot homes and businesses, and in extreme cases, even murder the owners.

Since the perpetrator (or perpetrators) always seem to arrive on-scene in the immediate aftermath of a devastating twister, she thinks it might be someone connected to the storm chasing community.

She contacts Chuck Rittenburg, a once-famous but now discredited storm chaser, who’s leading a crew of cinematographers in pursuit of violent tornadoes. She asks if she can tag along, traveling undercover as a magazine feature writer. Chuck agrees, not realizing at the time the extreme danger her request will bring.

Over the course of their two-week storm chase, a mutual attraction develops between Gabi and Chuck. Gabi finds herself acting as Chuck’s encourager, while at the same time coming to view him as a confessor-figure. She reveals deep personal secrets to him, including something she’s kept hidden from the FBI: the fact that she suffers from debilitating migraine headaches.

Her pursuit of the bad guys—-it turns out there are two—-ends violently and involves a terrifying threat, neither human nor tornadic, that no one could have imagined.

Supercell roars onto bookshelves in November.

Gabi’s CV:

born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1969
MA in Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, 1992
Interpreter, Federal District Court, Boston, 1992-97
Special Agent, FBI, 1998-current (Mobile, New Haven and Oklahoma City Field Offices)

PHOTO: courtesy of Roger Hill; Red River hailstorm, 2012