KILL WELL

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. The novel opens with California climate activist Cyn Wainwright on her way to a meeting to persuade an investment group not to fund an oil pipeline. She witnesses her boss and lover, Joe, get shot to death by a man who looks like he’s wearing a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy uniform. Surmising that she was meant to be murdered as well, and fearing that all the cops are corrupt, Cyn flees east by Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, which is overshadowed by smoke from massive wildfires, and then to Chicago, which is suffering blackouts during a searing heat wave. She finally boards a Boston-bound train, where she is menaced by a squirrelly, gun-toting creep whom she dubs “Rat Face.” Cyn is rescued by attractive college graduate Jimmy Caine. Jimmy and Cyn take shelter with Jimmy’s dad, Davin, a digital-publishing consultant and wannabe sculptor living in a farmhouse in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where he spends much time bemoaning the rising cost of living stemming from climate change, including heavy rains that damaged his Airbnb unit. Omnipresent weather upheavals give Guenette’s yarn a haunting, apocalyptic air, but the long-winded discussions about climate change (“fossil fuel interests have far too long been pushing for delays, and then there’s the needlessly slow progress of some of the biggest renewable energy projects”) sometimes bog the narrative down. Fortunately, the novel’s thriller elements are first-rate, featuring deliciously unsavory lowlifes and intricate procedural details written in punchy prose. (“The client wants it to look like the target killed herself, so he’ll have to remove the silencer after he shoots her nice and up close, rub the end of the barrel on her shooting hand for the nitrates trace, leave the gun.”) Even global-warming deniers will enjoy the resulting page-turner.

Despite overdone soapboxing, vivid characters and hard-boiled writing make this an entertaining suspenser.