Climate fiction and thriller, Kill Well tells the story of a young climate activist caught up by a Big Oil deal that is willing to kill for profit.

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.

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 factor for the bottom line.

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 not-so subtle consequences reveal that the impending world of global warming is already a decisive part of our everyday 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.