GREENWASH

The most dangerous lie she had ever encountered did not raise its voice once.

Lena Lindqvist is sixteen, the daughter of an investigative journalist in Malmö, Sweden. She has been raised on her mother's three rules: verify, cite, never publish what you cannot defend.

At six-thirty on a Tuesday morning in January, against her mother's explicit instructions, she opens a cream-coloured folder on the kitchen table. Inside is the embargoed sustainability report of Holm & Sønn, the most quietly admired energy group in southern Sweden, signed off by its kind-faced chairman, Konrad Holm.

By breakfast, Lena has done the math in pencil in the back of her chemistry homework book. The company's Net Positive by 2030 promise is off by a factor of five.

That same evening, the chairman's daughter — Alva, the girl from Lena's choir whose voice once lifted out of a folk song and landed somewhere quiet in Lena's chest — sends her a single text. Come to my house. Please.

For readers ages 13 and up. The most interior, most literary book in the Climate Keepers cycle. A careful sixteen-year-old learns the difference between being careful and being silent. A slow-burn LGBTQ+ first love at the center of a corporate-greenwashing investigation. A mother who has been waiting her whole career for this story. And the small green light that turns on, finally, when Lena types from her bed at three a.m.: <i>I have something tonight I do not know how to do alone.

This is Book Four of The Reckoning. Each book stands alone. Book One: High Water. Book Two: Dry. Book Three: Bleach. Book Five: The Last Island. Finale: The Gathering.

"Be careful. Verify. Cite. Never publish what you cannot defend. And then publish anyway, when the time comes.