Kill Well

Kill Well is the first book in The Steep Climes Quartet, a fiction series that explores the consequences of climate change in everyday lives in the near future and focuses, through 2050, on Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where subtle and not-so subtle consequences reveal that the future world of global warming is already here. In Kill Well, Cynthia is a young woman who is on a trip with her boss, a V.P. at Carbon’s End, a ClimateProgress.Org spin-off aimed at accelerating fossil fuel divestiture, but on the way to a meeting with an investment group near Mojave, Cynthia witnesses his murder. 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 61-year-old Davin Caine’s son Jimmy who is homeward bound on the North Shore Limited, Cynthia ends up at Davin’s Housatonic hous