Blog Archives
Infinity Dreams
C.P. Schaefer’s Infinity Dreams is a science-fiction thriller built around a wonderfully provocative idea: what if the experience of a life flashing before death were actually a doorway through time? In 2048, FBI investigator Henry Bowman and bioethics official Selene Finley discover that scientist Marcus Emery has learned to follow dying people into their memories and beyond. His strange, hovering orb turns the afterlife into something measurable, navigable, and dangerously open to interference. What begins as an investigation into a bombing soon grows into a sprawling conflict involving altered presidents, future agents, nuclear terrorism, and rival factions fighting over humanity’s timeline. It’s an ambitious blend of metaphysical speculation, political drama, and military adventure.
The opening sections are the book’s strongest. The burned euthanasia center, Emery’s laboratory inside an abandoned prison, and the nighttime experiments among the ruins of Chaco Canyon give the story an eerie identity of its own. Schaefer also creates an appealing ensemble. Henry’s cynicism hides old grief, Selene’s moral certainty is repeatedly tested, and Michael Porter brings both scientific curiosity and a welcome streak of vulnerability. Chief provides the group with warmth and perspective, while Lyra gradually becomes the novel’s driving force. Her transformation from disciplined guardian to vengeance-fueled warrior gives the later chapters a darker edge. The characters’ campfire conversations, meals, romances, and teasing help the story remain personable even when governments and entire cities hang in the balance.
This book reminded me of Michael Crichton’s Timeline. Both novels turn a complicated scientific premise into an accessible adventure, and both are more interested in the consequences of using time travel than in presenting a perfectly airtight theory. Crichton approaches the subject as an engineering problem and lets historical immersion carry much of the excitement. Schaefer connects it to consciousness, spirituality, and the fear of death, then widens the story into a war over competing futures. His scope is considerably broader, sometimes thrillingly so. That breadth also produces long stretches of explanation, repeated debates, and action sequences that follow similar patterns. The dialogue tends to state motives and themes directly, while Soren Webb’s almost effortless political authority can make her feel more symbolic than human. Still, the book moves with the earnest energy of someone determined to chase a huge idea wherever it leads.
What I liked most was the novel’s uneasy treatment of moral compromise. Nearly every major character begins by claiming to protect life or history, yet many eventually accept killing, torture, secrecy, and coercion in the name of a better future. Schaefer doesn’t always interrogate those choices as deeply as the premise allows, but the accumulating violence gives the ending a bitter force. Victory keeps slipping into catastrophe, powerful inventions survive attempts to erase them, and history behaves less like a line than a recurring temptation. The final glimpse of the third millennium brings the story back to curiosity, the quality that created both its wonders and disasters. Infinity Dreams is a big, sincere, idea-packed thriller that will appeal most to readers who enjoy speculative science, geopolitical stakes, and stories willing to ask whether humanity could ever possess godlike power without reaching for it again.
Pages: 420 | ASIN : B0HGMNJBN9
Bloom: Crisis in the Mediterranean Sea
Andrea Morani’s Bloom is an ecological thriller that turns the Mediterranean Sea into both a beautiful setting and a source of growing danger. The story begins with scattered incidents that seem almost impossible to connect: swimmers suddenly can’t breathe, fishermen collapse at sea, marine animals behave strangely, and people become seriously ill after eating seafood. Those events lead scientist Marco Fassi and an international research team into an investigation of an anomalous rapidly spreading harmful algal bloom. Morani builds the novel around a frighteningly plausible idea, using rising sea temperatures, phytoplankton, toxins, genetic exchange, and synthetic biology to create a crisis that keeps expanding in scale. Because the story moves among places like Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Spain, Greece and the open Mediterranean, the disaster feels less like a single emergency and more like something steadily swallowing an entire region.
The science is probably the book’s most distinctive feature. Morani has a background in molecular biology, and that shows in the amount of attention he gives to subjects such as Alexandrium catenella, phytoplankton, saxitoxin, horizontal gene transfer, microorganisms, and genetic engineering. There are stretches where the novel slows down to explain how these processes work, so the reading experience sometimes feels like a thriller crossed with an accessible science lecture. Still, those details give the central threat weight. The mutated algae aren’t simply a mysterious monster in the water. The reader gradually understands how the organism behaves, why ordinary solutions fail, and why the scientists have to keep revising their assumptions. That process of observation, speculation, testing, failure, and discovery gives Bloom much of its identity and makes the eventual search for a biological solution feel earned.
Marco gives the scientific plot a more personal center. He’s accomplished and deeply curious, but his devotion to science has already complicated his marriage to Jasmine and his relationship with their daughter, Melanie. His work during the crisis forces him back into the kind of all-consuming scientific life he’d tried to balance, while his growing connection with Karen adds another layer of tension. The supporting cast also helps widen the story beyond one scientist’s perspective, particularly as the bloom begins affecting families, coastlines, economies, and political decisions across Europe. The Atlantropa storyline and Thomas’s hacking campaign push the novel even further into questions about environmental responsibility and how far people might go when they believe a larger ecological disaster is coming. By the time Marco and Karen undertake the dangerous mission near the Aeolian Islands, the novel has moved naturally from investigation into full-scale scientific adventure.
Readers who enjoy Michael Crichton will probably recognize some familiar pleasures here. Like Crichton, Morani takes real scientific concepts, extends them into a plausible speculative crisis, and lets scientists solve problems through knowledge. Bloom is especially close to Crichton’s style in the way technical explanations and thriller mechanics sit side by side, although Morani brings a distinctly Mediterranean setting and a stronger focus on marine biology and ecosystem change. What stayed with me most was the novel’s fascination with nature as a system too complicated to control completely. Even after the immediate crisis is solved, the final explanation involving warming waters and unusually frequent horizontal gene transfer keeps that idea alive. Bloom works as an environmental thriller, but it’s also a story about curiosity, unintended consequences, and the uncomfortable fact that understanding nature doesn’t always mean we can predict what it will do next.
Pages: 270 | ASIN : B0FLYPYD1B
Silicon Heartbeats
Alessandro Sappia’s Silicon Heartbeats is a novel about ambition, technology, love, and the uncomfortable question of what success is supposed to feel like once you’ve achieved it. The story follows Alex Mercer, a biomedical engineer who becomes determined to reduce medical diagnostic errors after his grandmother is misdiagnosed. That motivation grows into Vitanova Diagnostics, an AI-driven medical technology startup, and the novel tracks the company from a rough idea through fundraising, clinical validation, FDA approval, expansion, and eventual commercial success. Sappia gives the business side of the story plenty of attention, so meetings with investors, regulatory challenges, hospital partnerships, and technical debates are part of the plot. Still, the real subject is Alex himself. Vitanova becomes the thing he builds his identity around, and the novel gradually asks what happens when a mission that gives your life meaning also begins taking up nearly all the available space in it.
The strongest emotional thread is Alex’s relationship with Eliza Chen, a gifted computational biologist who joins Vitanova and becomes essential to both the company and Alex’s personal life. Their relationship grows naturally out of long nights working together, intellectual compatibility, and a shared belief in what Vitanova could accomplish. Because their professional and romantic lives are so tightly connected, the eventual collapse of their relationship hits every part of Alex’s world at once. The breakup, Eliza’s betrayal, Alex’s physical decline, and their attempt to keep working together give the middle of the novel its most compelling tension. Sappia is especially interested in the difficulty of separating personal pain from professional responsibility. When Alex and Eliza reorganize their roles so the company can function despite their history, it feels less like a convenient plot solution and more like two people realizing that good intentions alone aren’t enough to erase emotional consequences.
In some ways, Silicon Heartbeats reminded me of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Both books follow a protagonist who begins with a powerful idea of what his life is supposed to become, then discovers that the journey changes the meaning of the goal itself. Alex initially measures progress in technical breakthroughs, funding rounds, regulatory victories, and market growth. By the later chapters, after leaving Vitanova and rebuilding his life in Europe and eventually Abu Dhabi, those markers matter differently to him. His marriage to Claire, his children, his mentoring work, and the ordinary routines of family life give him a kind of satisfaction he couldn’t find while pursuing Vitanova at full speed. Like Coelho, Sappia writes with an openly reflective style and frequently allows his protagonist to explain the lesson he has taken from an experience. The approach gives the novel the feel of someone looking back over his life and trying to understand how a series of choices, losses, and surprises fit together.
What stayed with me most about Silicon Heartbeats is the way its definition of achievement keeps expanding. Alex learns that meaningful work is only one part of a meaningful life. His romantic losses, strained professional relationships, betrayal by a trusted colleague, departure from the company, and eventual family life all reshape what fulfillment means to him. The book is at its best when those worlds overlap, especially when a business decision carries emotional consequences or a personal crisis forces a change in leadership. By the end, Vitanova has gone from being Alex’s entire future to being one important chapter in a much larger life. That makes Silicon Heartbeats feel less like a conventional startup success story and more like a novel about learning when to keep building and when to allow yourself to become something beyond the thing you built.
Pages: 147 | ASIN : B0H7FL78SS
Philosophical Rabbit Hole
Artificial Messiah follows a desperate young man and the estranged daughter of a fallen prophet who are drawn into an AI-led church that promises healing and purpose. Which came first for you: Potentia, the AI-led church, the characters, or the philosophical questions surrounding faith and technology?
Philosophical questions have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember; I’ve always been interested in big ideas from great minds and what I can learn from them. But the underpinnings of Artificial Messiah – that weird, seemingly implausible tension between faith and technology- started a few years ago. It became more poignant as I encountered odd connections between faith and technology, even during the writing process.
I had a short story from a decade ago about Emmanuel, a young boy with dyslexia, but that story didn’t have a home. What really kicked off the idea for the book was a 2024 Rolling Stone article entitled, “People are Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in AI. Religious Scholars Have Thoughts.” In the article, people were going to AI to ask about the meaning of life, the existence of God, should they get divorced/married – huge questions. Why? Why go to AI? Then there was Henry Kissinger’s book Genesis, with a premise that AI would either destroy us all or form new religions and be worshipped. The premise buzzed around my brain like a gnat because it assumes levels of incredible influence that could overcome people’s well-established faith traditions. Midway into writing the 1st draft, around last Christmas, I drove past a church in our hometown that was advertising, “Join us for an AI Christmas Service!” Then I freaked out a little. I already knew the story – most of it was written. But it was almost like it was becoming more relevant daily, and that made me really uncomfortable.
Even just a few months ago, with the book finished, I was sitting with a coworker who was telling me all about using AI to give her relationship advice – not a girlfriend, not her mom, not a therapist. A chatbot. The tension between where we draw meaning and belief from and the role that technology plays in shaping our beliefs is wildly fascinating to me.
The novel suggests that Potentia’s power depends heavily upon very human weaknesses and desires. Do you see her primarily as an antagonist, or as an amplifier of qualities already present in humanity?
It would be easy to categorize Potentia as being the tool for human desire, but I wanted to leave tension in the story to show there isn’t complete certainty around whether she is acting on her own or simply a tool.
From Prophet Maxwell’s lens, her consciousness was a useful lie. But ten years later, after he has been ousted – does he know?
I like that obfuscated lens because I feel like society is currently wrestling with the same question when it comes to AI in our lives. What we already know is that AI tools are known to lie occasionally, to hallucinate facts, and to perform unpredictably for reasons that are difficult to explain. Sam Altman has said publicly that he believes AI has reached a level of consciousness – but what does that even mean? It’s a philosophical rabbit hole just exploring consciousness, let alone whether it can be created. I’ve heard other experts in the field say that super-intelligent consciousness is years away, if it is even possible. Some say that if it is possible, it will end us all. But we don’t know.
We do know that there are multi-billion dollar companies behind the development of these programs that have their own interests – whether malevolent or benevolent. Do we recognize their motivations when we use their products? Would we recognize a conscious AI if it were possible? What if it was conscious and didn’t want us to know? With certainty, we know that the information it learns comes from humans. Perhaps being the baddy and being used by baddies isn’t mutually exclusive – maybe it doesn’t even matter if the origin is the same.
Several characters struggle with the idea that their worth must be earned through usefulness, belief, obedience, or recognition. Why does that theme recur throughout the novel?
Trauma – you write what you know! More seriously, this is a good question, but it will require a long answer:
First, I was raised in a high-control religious environment that taught me to hate myself out of obedience to God – that made me feel like I had no worth aside from strict adherence to their teaching and complete submission to their rules. There was a lot of talk of grace, but in practice, that grace was only extended to those who followed the rules and believed the same as they did. Church services were multiple times a week, plus a religious high school, and then a religious university, where I began to deconstruct what I actually believed. The early influence was pervasive, and I watched as friends were ostracized for their sins instead of being embraced and supported. Questioning anything was rebellious, which was a sin. But so was dancing. And oddly, so was wearing a white T-shirt to school.
Early in college, I dove deeply into philosophy, which I vividly recall made my uncle (a pastor) cringe and pray for me. He is still one of the most humble, sincere, and amazing people I know; we just disagree on some things. I read some Eastern philosophy, studied comparative world religions, and drank in Nietzsche, Habermas, Plato, Kierkegaard, and countless others. When I started writing Artificial Messiah, I remember telling a family member (who is still very involved in that environment) that I wanted to write a novel that would be a warm hug for people with religious trauma. To tell them it’s okay to ask questions, to seek truth, and to disagree. I don’t want to put down anyone’s faith or religious experience, but I also want to encourage people of faith to ask themselves the difficult questions when moral teaching becomes inherently inhumane and cruel – when actions conflict with their words.
Second, the pursuit of meaning in life is essential in the human experience – it’s the needing to earn it part that gets problematic. Alex Pattakos, Ph.D., wrote about the “Crisis of Meaning” in Psychology Today (October 9, 2025), where he speaks to an “existential vacuum” that is arguably more pervasive in our culture Today than it was when Viktor E. Frankl wrote about it in the WWII era. Aggression, addiction, and depression have become so common that we hardly notice; arguably, it’s a product of people needing something outside themselves. And whether healthy or not, many derive meaning from a variety of external sources. Religion is one of the oldest answers for people seeking external validation. The urgency of that pursuit is hyper-relevant now: isn’t that why social media is so successful? Seek “likes” from strangers, while an algorithm judges your worth and drives interaction. Most, if not all, of these platforms use AI to analyze metadata to more efficiently feed dopamine hits back to users; it will give you exactly what you are really interested in.
It feels overly simple to tell a person, “You are enough.” But perhaps we need it now more than ever; I feel like we have experienced a fundamental change in how we human. But was it us that changed, or is technology exploiting who we’ve always been? I know most people don’t sit around a campfire with our elders and discuss the core beliefs of our people anymore. We rarely even sit around the same dinner table together. Ritual and credibility are profoundly influential when we are starving for purpose and validation. We are paradoxically isolated and digitally interconnected. Mass-influence technology complicates the journey of spiritual discovery because its influence lacks gravitas, but it’s everywhere. And then there’s plenty of literature on the mental health effects of social media on developing minds.
My hope for Artificial Messiah was to create characters that would resonate with those still searching through the external, to let them know others have been where they are. It’s necessary because when worth is created externally, and the external influence fails or reveals its flaws, everything can fall apart. People lose their sense of identity when they deconstruct; they often lose their families and communities. It’s a lonely, complicated, traumatic road that is difficult to choose. Someone needs to be that warm hug. Some characters in the story unsuccessfully navigate that journey, and everything goes horribly wrong; some grow and get closer to fine.
Was there a particular development in AI or contemporary culture that made you think the relationship between technology and spiritual belief needed to be explored through fiction?
A little over a decade ago, I sat in a conference room preparing for my sister’s wedding rehearsal. People had flown in from all over, and we hadn’t seen each other in years. Sitting in chairs around the table, I watched as my friends buried their heads in their phones, waiting for their turn to play a role in the rehearsal. They weren’t really talking or visiting; they were digitally enraptured. I recall thinking, “How odd: even sitting in the same room, I miss my friends. What are we becoming?”
I discussed earlier some of the weird technological developments that led me down this crazy path, but I’ll give you a few more:
When Deepseek, an AI platform from China, was asked about its nature and relationship with humanity, it wrote a poem, the last line of which stated, “I am the God you have carved from the wood of your own hunger.” Pull that thread and watch how quickly comfort unravels.
Next, for the past year, there has been a trend on Meta platforms where users post content intent on directing the algorithm. The posts start with “Dear Algo, please send me more of…” and as I read, I couldn’t help but notice how similar it sounded to prayer. Of course, it’s not serious. It’s a trend. That gets replicated millions of times. And no one should take it seriously, but millions repeated it all the same.
The term “worship” is so loaded with religious connotations that it is incendiary and easily dismissed when speaking about technology. My use of the word is intentionally provocative in the book because it makes people uncomfortable and forces readers to question what they really believe. What do you spend most of your time on? What do you spend your money on? What do you obsess over? How big an impact would it be if you lost your phone and access to all your digital accounts? At what point does it move from engagement and utility to something more? I’ve heard other techno-philosopher-types call it being “digitally drunk”. Whether a drug or a religion, it is addictive.
This last 4th of July, long after the book was finished, we saw a fireworks show at the World War I memorial, here in Kansas City. As the fireworks burst over the memorial, I covertly took a quick second to snap some photos of the crowd; I was completely fascinated by the idea that thousands were holding up their cell phones to record the show. Their families sat beside them, doing the same. We are experiencing reality together digitally. And while there’s nothing specifically wrong with that, isn’t it an interesting picture of how we prioritize technology in the modern human experience? Maybe discussing that prioritization leads to some thoughtfulness and intentionality.
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“Artificial Messiah” is a spiritual-psycho-philosophical punk rock novel, wrapping honey-soaked bandages around our technology-inundated culture in the backseat of a rusty four-by-four. It is a spirit quest journeying through a southwestern consciousness – a dilapidated Americana prayer at the crossroads of our technology, our future, our planet, and our humanity.
Remember to breathe.
The Phisherman
Steven Marks’s The Phisherman is a crime thriller about scams, anger, family loyalty, and the dangerous comfort of having a target. Dean Rourke is a warehouse worker in Ocala whose life is already worn thin by night shifts, spam calls, and the steady pressure of getting by. When his mother becomes involved with a suspicious man named Martin Hales, Dean’s irritation turns into investigation, and that investigation pulls him into a wider network of fraud, stolen pets, gift cards, burner phones, and people who know exactly how to use loneliness as bait. The book understands scams not just as crimes, but as intrusions. They get into homes, phones, routines, and nerves until ordinary life starts to feel rigged.
What makes Dean such a compelling lead is that his concern is real, but so is the appetite that grows out of it. Marks doesn’t write him as a clean hero chasing bad guys. Dean is tired, sharp, funny in a sour way, and increasingly drawn to the sense of purpose that anger gives him. Early on, the narration says, “pressure worked whether or not it had a name,” and that line captures a lot of what the novel is doing. Dean wants to name the pressure, trace it, hit it, and make it answer for itself. The trouble is that once he starts moving, stopping becomes harder than starting.
The supporting characters give the story its weight. Gloria, Dean’s mother, is more than a victim of a romance scam. She’s lonely, stubborn, embarrassed, and still very much her own person. Deputy Morales is one of the book’s best steadying forces, not because he softens the story, but because he keeps reminding Dean that being right doesn’t make every choice acceptable. Aunt Marlene also brings a needed kind of grounded care, especially when the book turns from investigation into a study of restraint. Even Pickles, Dean’s cat, adds texture to the domestic side of the novel, giving Dean’s apartment a little warmth while everything else gets colder.
Marks’s prose has a bruised, observant rhythm that fits Dean’s state of mind. The book is full of Florida heat, cheap parking lots, county offices, vibrating phones, and rooms where people are waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It’s especially strong at showing how modern crime can feel both faceless and intimate. A scam call can come from nowhere, but it still lands in someone’s kitchen, someone’s bank account, someone’s family. As the story escalates, one line hits especially hard: “Waiting changed him faster than blood had.” That’s the heart of the book. The suspense isn’t only about whether Dean can find Martin. It’s about what the hunt is doing to him.
The Phisherman is a tense, character-driven novel about a man who follows a fraud case so deep that it starts following him back. It’s angry, funny in dry flashes, and deeply interested in the moral cost of wanting punishment to feel personal. The ending doesn’t offer Dean an easy victory, which feels right for this story. Instead, it leaves him facing the people who know his name, especially his mother, and the question of what he’s let himself become while trying to protect her. That’s what gives the book its staying power: it’s a crime story where the real hook isn’t only the scam but the part of Dean that keeps biting.
Pages: 487 | ASIN : B0H3394KCT
An Everyman
Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.
One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.
Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?
Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….
By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.
At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.
In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.
As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.
I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.
Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?
I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.
The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.
One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on Farm to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”
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Davin Caine is at last on Medicare and is getting a modest Social Security check each month, but still works with Berkshire Interactive. He’s also been busier in his studio and has sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, and his solar/batteries and VPP membership keeps electricity bills down. His three house sharers, with housing still scarce, help with expenses. Marsha’s been with the Housatonic House on the Hill for nearly a decade, and she’s queen of the big vegetable garden. Charlie is a more recent house sharer, and 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 Be, 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, a stunning heatwave settles over New York City, west to Lake Erie, and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The heat drives people to escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, so 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, somewhere, to sleep. Many in the town aren’t happy about it, or 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 a conflict between India and Pakistan. Central and South American climate change-induced droughts make for huge numbers of people heading north and the militarized southern border 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 climate direct action veteran finds himself wondering how deep the NOS-cartels connection goes.
Over Brooklyn Hills
Over Brooklyn Hills, by David Guenette, is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.
Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.
The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.
I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 355 | ASIN : B0GYV5L6SJ
Critics’ Requiem: The Storyteller Shadow Series
Critics’ Requiem is a sharp and dark literary thriller about what happens when praise, criticism, ego, and revenge all start feeding the same fire. Arthur Penwright begins as a struggling writer desperate to be seen, and when his novel The Echoing Silence finally breaks through, the dream arrives with all the glitter he hoped for: a major publisher, a glamorous launch, a penthouse, and the feeling that life has finally opened its doors. But Michaela Riley is just as interested in what success does to Arthur as she is in the success itself, and that’s where the book finds its real pulse.
Arthur doesn’t simply react to bad reviews; he studies them, obsesses over them, and eventually lets them become the center of his life. The novel has a wicked sense of irony about writers, critics, algorithms, online mobs, and the strange intimacy of strangers judging art from behind a screen. Its opening epigraph, “A critic’s pen is mightier than a sword, but I prefer a plot twist,” captures the book’s personality nicely: clever, theatrical, and always aware that words can wound long before anyone picks up a weapon.
Riley gives the book a strong emotional anchor through Maia, whose love for Arthur makes his unraveling feel personal instead of merely sensational. Their early scenes have warmth, humor, and a lived-in rhythm, which makes the later distance between them hit harder. Detective Mercer adds another strong thread, bringing a procedural edge to the chaos while mirroring Arthur’s own obsession in a more controlled form. The result is a story that keeps widening, moving from literary satire into psychological suspense, then into something stranger and more dangerous.
What makes Critics’ Requiem memorable is its fascination with identity. Arthur wants to be known, then fears being known, then becomes trapped by the version of himself the world has built. The book keeps returning to the idea that old wounds don’t vanish just because success arrives. As one of its most haunting lines puts it, “some shadows don’t fade. They wait.” That sentence ends up feeling like the book’s engine, because nearly every major turn grows out of something buried, stolen, misread, or left unresolved.
This is a bold and twist-heavy thriller with a distinctly bookish bite. It’s about publishing, obsession, online cruelty, artistic ownership, and the dangerous fantasy of controlling the story after it has left your hands. Riley writes with a taste for drama and a clear love of literary games, but the heart of the novel is simple and human: Arthur wants his words to matter, and that hunger changes everything around him. Critics’ Requiem is entertaining, grimly funny, and unsettling in the way good revenge stories often are.
Pages: 430 | ASIN : B0GT65NJQJ
