Chilling Effect

A Global Climate Thriller

By: R.J. Pineiro

Narrated by: D.C. Newman

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's Summary

In Chilling Effect, R.J. Pineiro’s newest thriller, William Kiersted is committed to accelerating the effects of climate change through frightening acts of ecological terrorism. 

Global climatologists Doctors Natasha Shakhiva and Konrad Malone join forces with Rachel Daly from the CIA’s new global climate counterterrorist unit, as well as its Russian counterpart, in an attempt to spoil Kiersted’s plan to cripple humanity, if not outright destroy it.

Across three continents, the battle rages as Kiersted manages to stay one step ahead of his pursuers while executing a plot so grim, yet so compellingly real, it sounds like tomorrow’s headlines.

©2019 Rogelio J. Pineiro (P)2019 Todd Barselow, Auspicious Apparatus Press

An utterly terrible book that presents the right message wrt climate change

This book presents climate change evidence, woven into a dramatic narrative which kind of brings it to life. It may succeed in awakening a concern about the climate, in people just looking for an adventure novel. And if it does I think that’s brilliant.
But apart from that, the book is awful. It’s Islamophobic. It’s homophobic. It’s misogynistic in that every woman in the book, even both the heroines, get a verbal undressing & a male-gaze assessment. It’s xenophobic: written from a USA perspective it presents Russians as backward & simple; French and Germans as climate-deniers. It’s appallingly dismissive of migrants in one chapter, & in another it points out that millions of people will have to “be moved”. So it denies agency to anyone except the American heroes, who themselves have a bad case of the “God dammit, the whole town’s gonna blow”’s.
The writing is generally pretty poor, but in the first half of the book it’s burdened by an additional problem. Pineiro has inserted lots of mini-explications. These are the climate change evidence, but they’re dense and full of statistics. Just to give a for-instance: a character can barely stir a cup of coffee without gazing wistfully out the window at the mountains & remembering that 7% of this has led to an 86% reduction of that since such-&-such a year, releasing 45.2 cubic miles of the other ... It’s like death-by-powerpoint.
One last gripe: for the audio book D.C. Newman’s narration isn’t very good. He mispronounces some words, including ‘nuclear’ and ‘climatic’, and he tends to hesitate before any long scientific or non-English word.
So, if in doubt, buy a different book.