Hurricane Josephine, the earliest and strongest on record, hits Florida’s Gold Coast, and the devastation of South Beach and the Miami Metro area and the count of the dead and displaced staggers the nation.

The 2029 hurricane is all the news all the time, or at least that is what it seems like to Davin Caine, now 64 years old, but he’s also frustrated by the constant game of financial catch-up he’s forced to play in order to keep his Berkshire County, Massachusetts, house. The storm and its aftermath is all the news until the stories of a series of nation-wide murders and a possible terrorist organization calling itself Kill the Rich. Davin’s more focused on high energy prices and jumps in costs for insurance policies, and he’s just starting dating years after his divorce, and this is just the latest challenge. Davin must take on more paying work at Berkshire Interactive, the online newspaper service he’d help design and spend less time in his art studio, and food prices keep increasing because of adverse climate trends in some of the biggest food production sectors across the country and Central America, and his vegetable garden is more important than ever, as are the people who now share his house. He’s worrying about his daughter, now married and in graduate school in Barcelona, who is claiming that she’ll not have kids, and his son’s partner, a climate change activist, keeps trying to get Davin to do more for the cause. He’s trying to wrangle Jeannie Louise Smith as a Berkshire Interactive contributor, but she’s a national climate change politics and policies expert who lives in Great Barrington, and she’s busy with her research collective, The Library, applying AI to uncover sources of dark money, and this triggers a level of pushback from Big Oil that is far from academic.

Post-Trump, there are growing victories with climate change projects, and these are welcomed by Davin, but the costs that come with the budding number of such legislative initiatives, not so much. The pending The Sea Wall Act legislation is just one such enormous budget, and it just might be that fossil fuel-funded operatives are using Kill the Rich as cover in the latest behind-the-scenes dirty tricks to influence and control The Sea Wall Act.

And then a new climate direct action group, No One’s Safe, appears with a bang, and Davin is finding that climate change problems may be hitting close to home.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a 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 future world of global warming is already here. 

The post Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet first appeared on David Guenette.

Kill Well 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.

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 2026 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.

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 and everyday lives.

Kill Well is a near-future climate change thriller about a young woman divestiture activist on the run from Big Oil dark money’s contract killer.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a 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 future world of global warming is already here.

What reviewers and readers are saying about Kill Well, The Steep Climes Quartet: Book One

Set in a near future where the DSM 7 includes a diagnosis of “climate anxiety,” [Kill Well,] the first entry in The Steep Climes Quartet, Guenette’s pointedly realistic thriller series, opens with a bang… A pointedly realistic thriller of murder, the fossil fuel industry, and climate activism.

—BookLife Reviews

Introspective and solemn, Kill Well by David Guenette is a story of murder and danger, written by an author with a beautiful grasp of the English language, and an obviously deep, powerful, and intense passion for the harsh and shocking realities of climate change. There is everything to be said about an author who can turn that much knowledge into a thriller that often catches the reader off guard with its stunning realism.

—Independent Book Review

Murder is another dire effect of climate change in Guenette’s labyrinthine thriller. This first installment of the author’s Steep Climes series envisions a near future in which catastrophic heat, droughts, and floods are fraying society, hobbling the economy, and nurturing deadly conspiracies…. Even global-warming deniers will enjoy the resulting page-turner. Despite overdone soapboxing, vivid characters and hardboiled writing make this an entertaining suspenser.

—Kirkus Reviews

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 is author of Election and Little Children, both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated films, and for Little Children he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. His novels The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher have been adapted into TV series on HBO. His most recent novel is Tracy Flick Can’t Win.

David Guenette manages to show that the climate crisis is already affecting our energy and food bills and intensifying the drama of local politics. Kill Well is a fun ride but uncomfortable, too, as we get another way to think about where we’re heading all too quickly.

—Karen Christensen, CEO and Publisher, Berkshire Publishing Company and author of Eco Living, The Green Home, and Home Ecology (book and Substack newsletter)

No drowned worlds or climate-ravaged zombies, but a solid story with compelling characters that leaves you thinking that you haven’t been thinking nearly enough about climate change. I can’t wait until the next book in this series hits.

—Larry D. Gussin, Gussin Climate Action Fund at The Sierra Club Foundation

Climate change is not something that is happening independent of people’s lives, but rather is already part of each of our lives. Kill Well helps you see that, and, like a magic trick, gives a poignant, entertaining, and funny read along the way.

—Winslow Eliot, author of ten novels, including Bright Face of Danger, Heaven Falls, The Happiness Cure, and A Perfect Gem

Kill Well is more than just a suspenseful murder thriller. It combines the reality of climate change and climate activism, the potential devious tactics that the fossil fuel industry has at its disposal, and how difficult it is to exist without surveillance tracking you.

—Amazon Review

This is a terrific book and the first of its kind that I’ve read. It deftly combines a page-turning thriller with the dangers of climate change and the dark forces behind it, all the while giving us rich characters that you either care about greatly or strongly loathe…. One of the things I love is that there’s plenty of climate change consequences, but experienced the way most of us experience these, which is in the background, lurking, and so easily put out of mind. This tension between real danger and our lack of recognition of it reflects the plot’s progress that likewise moves unthinkingly through self-centered interactions, but all with the punch you want in an entertaining read.

—Amazon Review

The detective story is gripping and unfolds in the context of dark corporate forces working to maintain the corporate status quo. Guenette gets us inside the heads of his characters, even into the minds of evildoers. The balance between the ordinary Main Street concerns and the bigger picture takes surprising twists and turns.

—Amazon Review

It is amazing how David Guenette is able to blend emotions, anxieties of ordinary people who besides facing the challenges of everyday life, live at a time when drastic changes the environment will be very soon real and frightening. Yet, the language of the novel is so down to earth and friendly that makes the reading of this breathtakingly seductive.

—Amazon Review

The post Kill Well’s Description and Praise first appeared on David Guenette.

Of course, there are many kinds of writing and in many forms, including long-form fiction. I mean, jeeze, I seem unable to avoid the novelette form, for instance, even if I do have to keep looking up its defining characteristics. And then there is my publishing the first of a four-novel series this September as yet another sign of this sort of long form compulsion.

But short stories are another form I write, and I believe there are two collections close to being ready for publication, at least if I ignore my tendency to always find fault and overcome the drive to keep tweaking drafts.

And god be merciful, but I have been writing poetry since my college days, and there are several manuscripts’ worth of such poems, although the question of this work possessing any intrinsic worth remains open.

My plan for “Other Writing” is to present examples of my various work, and I plan to start with essays. I don’t write all that many essays these days, although I’d gotten a lot of practice with what is a closely-related form, the editorial, back when I was the editor of new media trade publications, including my first, New Media News, which published through The Boston Computer Society (if you recognize the name of this organization, then congratulations on collecting Social Security!). New Media News started around 1985, going away sometime in the early 1990s when digital publishing and online trade periodical publishers emerged. I emerged right alongside the commercial publications, editing Meckler Corporation’s industry newsletter, Multimedia Report and then the magazine CD-ROM World, and then a bit of a detour as Associate Editor for Kodak’s short-lived CD-Interactive (a format that the company was pushing but which proved as short-lived as the periodical itself), and then I settled in at Online Inc.’s CD-ROM Professional, as Editor-in-Chief, shepherding this into eMedia Professional and into a big monthly with a tripling of readership and ad revenue. There were a lot of editorials written along the way, and articles, and, of course, editing. I can also claim the questionable honor of having attended the first two generations of ebook conferences, as well as the third generation, when Amazon finally showed up with Kindle and moved the concept of ebooks into an actual market.

Speaking of Amazon, the first essay that I think I’ll post is titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One,” which explores the shortcomings of the Amazon Search mechanism, and at the time of its writing, I worried that I was being too tough of a critic. Rest assured, there will be a Part Two someday, and part of that future will report that my early critique was far too soft, as subsequent research reveals that the poor search interface and junk results are not a matter of incompetence and/or stinginess, as I had originally suggested, but entirely intentional and with self-serving commercial purpose.

The post To Try Essays first appeared on David Guenette.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a series that examines the near-future through 2050 consequences of climate change through the lens of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where subtle and not-so-subtle consequences reveal the future world of climate crisis is already here.

Quotidian

quo-tid-i-an
kwō-ˈti-dē-ən

adjective

1. 1. 1. occurring every day

1. 1. 1. a.
         belonging to each day; everyday, as in “quotidian routine”
         b.
         commonplace, ordinary, as in “quotidian drabness”

noun

1. 1. 1. something (as an intermittent fever) that occurs each day

Having the climate crisis feel real in one’s day-to-day life is, I argue, an important prerequisite for an individual to take effective action. Even though we are steeped in the climate crisis, for most of us we can still too easily ignore it.

If I understand how democracy works, it is only when a sufficient number of individuals take action that significant change becomes likely. Considering the inertia in the form of economic interests—let’s mention here the fossil fuel industry and nations that deal in trillions of carbon dollars each year—it seems probable to me that successful climate crisis resolutions are going to have to push past of long-established and powerful self-interest-focused entities and this requires building a countering momentum in the form of huge numbers of individual. Is there a basis for optimism? Well, keep in mind, for example, that the current Republican House tried to tie the recent debt ceiling vote to agreements that would have severely undermined the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate change amelioration plans, which should make any person worry about our current politics stalling climate progress, but it is best not to lose hope.

Of course writing a series on climate crisis in its quotidian camouflage can be problematic for a novel’s need to be entertaining, and that’s why Kill Well and the other books of The Steep Climes Quartet carry the structure of thrillers. And when you think about it, the climate crisis is about as thrilling you can get for real life (i.e., existential)  drama, although not in a positive way, or as the old Chinese curse goes, May you live in interesting times.

The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One: Kill Well

Kill Well will be published on September 1, 2023

In Kill Well (The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One), 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. Panicked and terrified, Cynthia is on the run, moving in and out of disassociated states caused by a childhood trauma re-triggered by what she’s seen, obsessing to find a place she might be safe, and Great Barrington, in the Berkshires, has good memories for her.

Meeting sixty-one-year-old Davin Caine’s son, Jimmy, who is homeward bound on the North Shore Limited, Cynthia ends up at Davin’s Housatonic house, and a great news story for the interactive newspaper he has helped start lands in his lap.

On the other hand, a contract killer comes to the Berkshires, looking to finish the job of making it look like Cynthia is simply a suicide post-murder of her putative lover and boss.

The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Two: Dear Josephine

Dear Josephine will be published on February 2, 2024

Dear Josephine (The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Two) finds Davin Caine, now sixty-four years old, frustrated by the constant game of financial catch up he’s forced to play in order to keep his Berkshire County, Massachusetts, house, and high energy prices and jumps in costs for insurance policies are just the latest challenges. Davin must take on more paying work at the online newspaper service he helped design and spend less time in his art studio. Food prices too keep increasing because of adverse climate trends in some of the biggest food production sectors across the country, and his vegetable garden is more important than ever, as are the people who now share his house.

There are growing victories with climate change projects welcomed by Davin, but not so welcome are the costs that come with the budding number of such legislative initiatives, and the pending The Sea Wall Act legislation is one such enormous budget. In national news there is the story of a series of murders and a possible terrorist organization calling itself Kill the Rich, but it just may be that fossil fuel-funded operatives are using this as cover in the latest behind-the-scenes effort to influence and control The Sea Wall Act. Jeannie Louise Smythe, a national climate change politics expert who lives in Great Barrington, and her research collective, The Library, are applying AI to uncover sources of dark money, and this triggers a level of pushback that isn’t academic. And then Hurricane Josephine, the earliest and strongest on record, hits Florida’s Gold Coast, and the devastation of South Beach and the Miami Metro area and the count of the dead and displaced staggers the nation.

The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Three: Over Brooklyn Hills

Over Brooklyn Hills publication date, TBA

In Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, six years have passed since The Sea Wall Act was enacted thanks in part to the exposure of The Kehoe Institute’s criminal efforts to push the goals of an informal group of the extreme wealthy who hold vast fossil fuel interests.

For Davin Caine, now seventy years old, the economy finally has some bright spots, including ongoing renewable energy infrastructure programs that are relieving unemployment and chipping away at the country’s carbon footprint. But these efforts are expensive, and for many, including Davin, the cost of living remains expensive too.

It doesn’t help that China has grown belligerent as it tries to recover domestically from the worldwide recession, and a big point of contention is China’s hundreds of additional domestic and exported coal plants. The resulting economic sanctions against China are making that nation desperate to expand spheres of influence by any means necessary, and U.S. defense spending and debt are spiking yet again. Mass climate migration is adding fuel to the fire with border wars raging.

Even the Berkshires is having its own migration challenge with increasingly shocking numbers of young and economically marginal New York City residents trekking to the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires to escape a brutal summer in the city and the power cost demands for vital air conditioning. Great Barrington’s attempts to deal with an out-of-control housing crisis and spikes in crime results in an “us versus them” reactionary response, and civility and basic rights hang in the balance.

The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Four: Farm to Me

Farm to Me publication date, TBA

Twelve years after the events of the previous book, The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Four: Farm to Me, sees eighty-two-year-old Davin Caine losing sight of his dreams, literally, as his worsening macular degeneration is making it difficult for him to continue his art. Climbing all those stairs in his house in Housatonic is getting hard, and he’s having trouble believing he shouldn’t sell the house and studio and move somewhere more sensible.

Costs are still high but moderating as the clean energy infrastructure is driving down energy costs. Food costs—beyond what he needs out of his garden—are moderating too, at least locally, with more and more local farms in regenerative agricultural production as the movement toward local economy heats up.

But where there is business opportunity there is conflict, and Tri-Interactive, the expanded online news and information service Davin still occasionally consults for, has been hearing rumors about a play for consolidating the local food distribution business, and it’s looking more and more like extortion is becoming part of that play. It’s complicated for Davin because he’s long known Marion Fletcher-Gray from covering town politics over the years she’s been the Great Barrington town manager, but it looks like the town may be choosing the wrong side. Davin’s been mentoring some of the newly expanded Tri-Interactive staff of writers, and when the young reporter chasing a story about shifting affiliations among small food distribution companies dies in an unlikely accident, Davin finds himself caught up in a hometown conspiracy.

The post The Steep Climes Quartet Series Synopsis first appeared on David Guenette.