Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet

Dear Josephine is Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet, a series that examines the near- and mid-future consequences of climate change through the lens of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where subtle and acute consequences reveal that the future world of global warming is already here. Dear Josephine takes place in 2029, and follows the lives of several Berkshire County, MA-based characters, including Davin Caine, who's trying to do more of his art, but still often finds himself to busy taking on more and more responsibility at the interactive online newspaper he'd originally meant simply to consult on the backend content management system. Jeannie Louise Smith lives in Great Barrington, but her freelance work, as an analyst and writer on climate change science, policy, and politics is everywhere. Alicia Soares is the publisher of Berkshire Interactive eager for news, but less eager for a personal life, and Deidre Gustavson is the younger woman trying to build a life with Alicia.

Hurricane Josephine, the earliest and strongest on record, hits Florida's Gold Coast, and the devastation of South Beach and the Miami Metro area and the count of the dead and displaced staggers the nation.

The 2029 hurricane is all the news all the time, or at least that is what it seems like to Davin Caine, now 64 years old, but he's also frustrated by the constant game of financial catch-up he's forced to play in order to keep his Berkshire County, Massachusetts, house. The storm and its aftermath is all the news until the stories of a series of nation-wide murders and a possible terrorist organization calling itself Kill the Rich. Davin's more focused on high energy prices and jumps in costs for insurance policies, and he's just starting dating years after his divorce, and this is just the latest challenge. Davin must take on more paying work at Berkshire Interactive, the online newspaper service he'd help design and spend less time in his art studio, and food prices keep increasing because of adverse climate trends in some of the biggest food production sectors across the country and Central America, and his vegetable garden is more important than ever, as are the people who now share his house. He's worrying about his daughter, now married and in graduate school in Barcelona, who is claiming that she'll not have kids, and his son's partner, a climate change activist, keeps trying to get Davin to do more for the cause. He's trying to wrangle Jeannie Louise Smith as a Berkshire Interactive contributor, but she's a national climate change politics and policies expert who lives in Great Barrington, and she's busy with her research collective, The Library, applying AI to uncover sources of dark money, and this triggers a level of pushback from Big Oil that is far from academic.

Post-Trump, there are growing victories with climate change projects, and these are welcomed by Davin, but the costs that come with the budding number of such legislative initiatives, not so much. The pending The Sea Wall Act legislation is just one such enormous budget, and it just might be that fossil fuel-funded operatives are using Kill the Rich as cover in the latest behind-the-scenes dirty tricks to influence and control The Sea Wall Act.

And then a new climate direct action group, No One's Safe, appears with a bang, and Davin is finding that climate change problems may be hitting close to home.