As summer in 2035 approaches, an unrelenting heatwave settles over New York City and west to Lake Erie and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Many in the big city without the means to cope escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, and with a tight housing market, there’s little room for the hordes.

2035 sees battles over climate policy and new legislation continue, as does the march upward of average global temperatures. In the courts, finally, there are some very real legal threats to the fossil fuel industry still fighting for its future against the advancement of renewable energy. Addressing climate change remains something of one step forward-two step sideways jig.

Davin has been busy in his Housatonic studio and has sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley. His finances are modestly stable. His solar/batteries and VPP membership keeps electricity bills down. His three house sharers help with the Housatonic House on the Hill expenses. Marsha’s been there nearly a decade, and she’s queen of the big vegetable garden. Charlie is a more recent house sharer, but a nigh-on perfect one, since he’s often away on business or holed up in his third-floor bedroom working. The newest house sharer is Bee, a ceramic artist who helps Davin out with the first floor Airbnb apartment and who has just claimed a corner of the studio and could easily claim his heart if he isn’t careful.

But as summer approaches, the unrelenting heatwave settles over New York City and west to Lake Erie and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Many in the big city without the means to cope escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, and with a tight housing market, there’s little room for the hordes. Young Brooklyn hipsters take up camping in the woods around Monument Mountain Reservation and along the Appalachian Trail, or double and triple up at the summer homes of friends’ parents, or anywhere, really, somewhere, to sleep. Many in the town aren’t happy with the spike in petty crimes, and it’s up to Marian Gray-Fletcher, Great Barrington’s town manager, to solve the problem. But she’s distracted with her own philandering husband, until a drug-gang killing focuses her attention.

The international news is full of climate migration stories and political problems in Europe and an escalating conflict between India and Pakistan. Central and South American climate change-induced droughts make for huge numbers of people heading north. The southern border is militarized and running battles between cartels and U.S. forces are in the headlines. And then there’s No One is Safe, a climate terrorist organization that has a history of blowing up refineries and pipelines and the occasional oil exec, and one of them finds himself wondering how deep the NOS-cartels connection goes.

The post Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet first appeared on David Guenette.

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. 

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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

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