There are more and more eco thrillers appearing on the bookshelves at the moment, which is hardly surprising. The climate crisis is an emotive issue and there is always plenty of controversy around the topic – from wilful pollution of the environment to misinformation to the stymying of green initiatives by fossil fuel interests. Yet some readers find eco thrillers hard to pick up. More doom and gloom, torn straight from the headlines.
Todd Medema is a US-based author who wants to change all of that. With How to Surf a Hurricane, he’s arrived in the crime fiction genre with an eco thriller that comes full of whoops and white knuckle thrills. Action packed, it centres around a huge heist and there’s plenty of corruption and skulduggery. There’s a hint of Greek tragedy about it too. But above all else, Todd wanted his debut to be an eco thriller that gives readers hope.
With a background in software engineering, experience working with green tech companies including Tesla and a taste for heist-based storylines, Todd has just released the audiobook version of How to Surf a Hurricane, following on from the print edition which we reviewed in August 2025. We decided to invite him to join us on the site to tell us more about
What are crime fiction lovers going to love about it How to Surf a Hurricane and the audiobook version of it?
Well, if you love heists and thrillers like Ocean’s Eleven, you’ll love How to Surf a Hurricane! Yes, there’s a climate angle, but my goal first and foremost was to write a fun thriller. And the audiobook adds a whole extra level of enjoyment – our narrator did an amazing job of bringing the diverse crew to life.
The book is a climate heist, yes, but it’s specifically a hopeful climate heist, in a budding new genre called ‘solarpunk’. I hope more authors out there will write not just eco thrillers, but hopeful ones.
Who are your protagonists Moro Petroff and Victoria Wood? What inspired them and how have you developed them for the novel?
Moro Petroff is an engineer and heir to a powerful family energy business. Victoria Wood is an extreme athlete – hurricane surfing! – and solo mother. Although heists are known for fast-paced action, I wanted all of my characters to be deep and grow in every scene. Don’t want to spoil too much, though, so you’ll have to read on to see how they change.
What is hurricane surfing and how did you come up with the idea to employ it for a heist?
Hurricane surfing is the wild, fictional-but-technically-feasible sport of taking a jetfoil boat into the middle of a hurricane and seeing how fast you can go. The idea came to me when I asked the question: the climate is changing, so how will we be able to find some joy, fun, excitement in that as humans? There’ll be less snow, but more storms… What if extreme athletes figured out something thrilling to do with all those storms?
Who are some of the other interesting characters we’ll meed and what’s their contribution to the story?
Two of my other favourites – shh, don’t tell the characters I have favourites! – are Anne Le Blanc and Miki. Anne is a French salt-farming granny smuggler, and Miki is a strapping ex-oil worker living in Alaska. They’re both instrumental in setting up the distraction at the peak of the heist – but come from very different backgrounds and add a lot of depth to the world and how it’s adapting.
How has your background at Tesla and working with green technology informed and inspired the story?
Very much! The core premise of the heist, stealing a new battery technology, is directly informed by my work in the space. I started working in battery storage because I saw how revolutionary batteries are – not just for reducing greenhouse gases, but cleaning up our air and actually improving our economy. And a new chemistry like lithium-sulfur, which is real and currently being researched, would be a massive second revolution for the better!
There’s a growing number of eco thrillers. For you, why is this an important subgenre in crime fiction?
Climate change is happening and I think it’s important that we learn how to talk about it and explore it from many angles as a society. A lot of people are suffering from climate anxiety and depression, and being able to tell these stories of hope and action help remind us that we do have some power creating a future that isn’t depressing.
There’s a lot of action here, something that sets the book apart from more complex eco thrillers. How did you approach the action scenes and how did you want them to affect the reader?
Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Like a proper heist author, I took a lot of pacing and action notes from another thriller I really liked, the movie How to Blow up a Pipeline. I wanted every scene to advance the plot, rachet up the intensity, and shed more light on the characters and the world around them.
You’ve previously mentioned that The Great Gimmelmans by Lee Matthew Goldberg is a book that inspired you. What aspects of it gave you that inspiration?
One of my favourite parts of that book is the characters – in a way, that book was more about the characters than their heists, still with plenty of action, of course, and I really liked that approach because people come to a story for the thrills but they stay for the characters.
What’s next for Moro and what’s next for Todd Medema?
There’s definitely a sequel planned but for the moment, I’m taking a quick break from the Hurricane universe to edit a Solarpunk anthology! You can learn more about that project here: https://solarpunkpenpals.com/.
You can grab your edition of How to Surf a Hurricane as an audiobook using our buttons below, or order the pages and chapters version here.
