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I’ve been wearing the many hats a self-publisher must, including the back and forth with my editor as the manuscript for Dear Josephine moves closer to production, with a publication date in Spring 2024.
And then there is marketing and promotion. Of course, it would be great if you buy the book. Purchase links are found on the home page.
Kill Well is the first book within The Steep Climes Quartet, a series that looks at climate change. Kill Well begins in 2026 and with the final book, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047. An overview of the series is available here.
It isn’t particularly important that the books take place in the Berkshires. For those who don’t know, Berkshire County is the westernmost county in Massachusetts, butting up against the New York state line on the west, with the county having Connecticut to the south, and Vermont to the north. It is certain that Berkshire County is a lovely place, with gentle mountains and plenty of state forests and rivers and streams and—especially in the summer, when tourists come to visit or take residence in second homes—there’s a lot of culture, too, with Tanglewood being Exhibit A. But like many places where tourism drives the economy, and where manufacturing has long ago left, the economy for many residents is tough enough. Another likely aspect of Berkshire County, at least according to some climate models, is that severe chronic droughts are unlikely and hot days are more survivable and with its elevation, rising seas pose no direct threat. Still, we’ve already had our share of deluges and last year we all too often had smoke-choking days from the wildfires in eastern Canada, but overall, we’ve been fortunate.
And, of course, what happens elsewhere affects us all.
What is important to the series is that there is an anchoring location. The point of focusing the books through the Berkshire lens is that a sort of longitudinal study plays out, picturing how the environmental, economic, and societal consequences of the climate crisis may develop. The effort here is to show deeply developed characters dealing with quotidian tasks as the crisis grows worse over time.
Well, how much fun would that be, you may wonder. You might be pleasantly surprised with the humor in the book and the effective way that the news of climate change gets woven in, but worry not: there’s a thriller structure across the series, too. In Kill Well, the main character is dealing with paying ever-growing bills for food and power, while working at an online newspaper serving the county, but there’s a young woman, a divestiture activist who is dealing with past trauma, and that she is a person of interest in her boss’s death is not helping. She finds her way to the Berkshires and the main character’s home, while readers get to see the machinations behind the murder and the efforts to tie up loose ends.
Kill Well is available throughAmazon.com, in Kindle and paperback formats and through Books2Read.com and at Berkshire local bookstores.