John D. MacDonald's Murder in the Wind

So while Hilda moved up the Gulf, the rain moved up the coast, falling on innumerable motels and motel signs, on the raw bulldozed land where houses would soon be built, on the dredges and the draglines that were filling in the bays; it fell on a million pottery flamingos and uncounted shell ashtrays; it pounded gum wrappers, ice-cream spoons, broken coke bottles into the sand of the littered beaches; it thundered on roofs that sheltered the twined bodies of honeymoon and the slack bodies of the dying.
John D. MacDonald, Murder in the Wind (Fawcett, 1956).

MacDonald wrote many paperback originals (there is still an Edgar award for them) over many years; Murder in the Wind bears interesting similarities to one of his last books, Condominium, also about the destructive powers of a hurricane on the shoddy constructions of Florida.  Interestingly, few of MacDonald's books were made into movies because, though Murder in the Wind may end with a disastrous hurricane, character is more important to MacDonald than action and most of the book is about the lives, interior and exterior, of people affected by the wind and the rain:  the juvenile delinquents (an expression seldom heard today), the family who moved to Florida for their child's health and had to give up and return North, the widow who came to Florida to pick up her husband's ashes after his suicide, the tennis pro and his wealthy young wife, the Florida wheeler-dealer and his incompetent assistant, the young truck driver brooding about his unfaithful wife, the government agent tracking down the terrorists who killed his wife.  MacDonald brings the thoughts and lives of these people vividly alive as they try to escape fate and Florida.