Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer

To be honest, I skimmed this pretty hard. The narrative voice, that of a person dreamily narrating past events that led to as yet-unspecified disaster, got old really quickly; plus it felt like the character’s super questionable decisions were based more on plot pressure than any kind of logic or rational thought. Cybersecurity analyst Jane, ripe for midlife crisis, is drawn to the taxidermied body of an endangered (extinct?) hummingbird, traces its ownership to a dead ecoterrorist, and abandons work and family to fall down a rabbit hole of threats and shadowy corporate wrongdoing in a near-future world of vaguely-hinted-at environmental gloom. The book never quite felt believable enough for me to buy into the urgency of the plot at any point, and the main character was too much in her own head to tell me much about the world around her. This is supposed to be a “thriller” but I’m not thrilled about marking it as such… I was not thrilled.