I’m putting the first book, Kill Well, out in serial form. There are 52 chapters and I’ll go weekly, so after a year I’ll have good information about how serializing an existing novel works.
Although Kill Well is being serialized here on my website, I am also testing Substack as a serial publishing platform. I’m using the Substack email notification including a link in the Substack post to link to that chapter on my website. I’ve reconfigured my website with this dedicated Kill Well Serialized page—you are here—that readers will use to access the accruing chapters; think “Table of contents.” Since Substack features allow comments and chats (as soon as I figure out how chat works and whether it makes sense), this too may become part of the serialization experiment attempting to foster a reader community via Substack. I’m likewise hoping that Substack’s discoverability features work, but Substack’s search function is notoriously thin, and the algorithms opaque, so, mainly, finger-crossed when it comes to discoverability.
A Bit About Kill Well
Kill Well is a smart, taut thriller that grabs you on the first page and keeps you guessing all the way to the suspenseful conclusion. David Guenette knows a lot about hacking and corporate skullduggery, and he knows a lot about people too.
—Tom Perrotta, Election, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, and Little Children ( Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay), and The Leftovers (HBO co-creator) and Mrs. Fletcher (HBO executive producer).
Back copy promo copy:
In one quick glimpse, her world collapses.
Cynthia Wainwright was on her way to yet another fossil fuel divestment pitch, but now she is on the run. Her boss, a V.P. at Carbon’s End, is dead and someone is trying to make it look like she pulled the trigger.
Chicago’s record-breaking heatwave has a death count, riots, and rolling brownouts, and Jimmy Caine, recent graduate and even more recently laid off, is abandoning the city, heading home to the cool green hills of the Berkshires. On the long North Shore Limited train ride, a pretty woman named Cyn is in distress and he needs to help.
Davin Caine, post-divorce, has a big house and even bigger bills, and he is happy that his son is on his way home to Housatonic, but now with this mysterious young woman in tow. An even bigger problem is the contract killer who may be on the way to the house, working for powers operating in the shadows and desperate to tie up loose ends.
The Steep Climes Quartet
Kill Well is the first book in The Steep Climes Quartet, a provocative series that examines the near- and mid-future consequences of climate change through the lens of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where subtle and acute consequences reveal that the impending world of global warming is already a decisive part of our everyday lives.
In the first three books of The Steep Climes Quartet, the residents of the Berkshires — a pleasant bucolic place, by the way — don’t have a lot of direct experience with the terrible consequences of climate change and, like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, taking place in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but Davin, the Berkshire-based main character, is an economically pressed recent divorcee and mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and the income he’s struggling with. The worst thing that happens to him in the first book, climate-wise, is that a heavy rain damages his vegetable garden and a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, and that brings her to Chicago where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, but who is now heading home to escape the heat and the slowing economy. The two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house in Housatonic, and there’s a contract killer in play, too. The prevailing theme in Kill Well is the widespread economic stress tied to climate change of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy progress.
What is it really like to live in our time of climate change? For most Americans over the next two or three years, it may seem mostly just some unusual news about bad weather, even as signs and trends point to a coming overturn of our comfortable lives, including the growing financial costs levied on our day-to-day lives by global warming. But make no mistake, there is a war going on, especially in the land of Free Market, and when millions and billions of dollars are at stake, meddlesome climate change activists can become a negative factor for the bottom line of entrenched interests.
Readers Who Like…
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, while being focused globally, share with my series realistic and in-depth perspectives on climate change and the aversion to fantasy and apocalypse. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Jenny Offill’s Weather, and Richard Powers’ The Overstory focus on, like The Steep Climes Quartet, deep character development. Yes, I know that I’m unduly flattering myself putting my work in these writers’ company, but the point I’m making is that the series keeps front and center characters living in a world recognizable to everyone . It’s my hope that readers will find themselves identifying with the world portrayed in the series and thus better understand the developing climate crisis within their own lives.
If you love well-researched fiction and find entertaining character-rich books a favorite way to better understand the complexities, challenges, and compromises that lie ahead for us all, this series is for you.
Where to Buy Kill Well
Kill Well, Book One of The Steep Climes Quartet, is available as a Kindle book and paperback through Amazon and through other ebook stores at Books2Read.com, or order the paperback through your favorite bookstore or through Bookshop.org.