“This man seemed to draw trouble to himself like water finds a drain.” That is a good one-sentence summary of AES O’Neill’s EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE CAN’T STOP LOVE AND MURDER, the second book in a planned trilogy focusing on laconic military contractor Alby O’Brien and a dancer named Ginger. In the first book, Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder, Alby wakes up in an Iraqi hospital to learn that he has to flee the country–now. Confused but scared, he starts over in New Jersey, a life that is further upended when his coworkers steal from a bank under mob control. Alby is forced to unpack what went wrong while dodging Jagger, the mob’s fixer, as his volatile relationship with Ginger unfolds.

In EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE, Alby, accompanied by Ginger, is being relocated by U.S. government agents from New Jersey to Sedona, Arizona, with the injured Jagger (Alby stabbed him in the first book) in pursuit. This gives the novel a No Country for Old Men vibe, especially in the character of Jagger, who, like Anton Chigurh, is cunning, relentless, and not to be trifled with. (Unlike Chigurh, Jagger is chattier than a Bond villain.) Romance fans will enjoy the Alby-Ginger dynamic, which illustrates the stops-and-starts of nurturing a relationship amid the distraction of running for one’s life. One of the most human moments of the book occurs when Alby and Ginger make small talk in bed. Alby “felt unsure of what to do next. So he didn’t do anything . . . He realized that he was too nervous to figure out if this was the sex moment or not—championing the mundane helped.”

The best mystery writers don’t just gin up a good plot. Their books are time capsules, forever evoking certain eras: Agatha Christie’s upper-crust British society; Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles noir; the aridity (and vapidity) of Carl Hiassen’s South Florida. In the first book (Even a Pandemic), O’Neill uses COVID-19 as a grim backdrop. In the second, that role is played by climate change, such as when Alby and Ginger survive a 120-mile-per-hour Arizona sandstorm that “hit the glass porch door like a bullseye, leaving a gaping hole.” The town meeting that follows pits rationalists (“With the infrastructure money from the government, we can buy all the materials we need to make our homes and businesses safer”) against alarmists (“No way am I letting the Feds into my town!”). O’Neill can be preachy, as when Ginger tells the crowd, “Those storms, all this hell . . . doesn’t recognize politics or religion, it just sees shit it can rip apart and destroy,” but, sadly, he isn’t wrong.

AES O’Neill’s EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE CAN’T STOP LOVE AND MURDER (the second in a series) is a literary thrill ride full of sharp social commentary wrapped in a mystery with a touch of romance.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader