MELTING DOWN. By Harvey Stone (The Way Things Are Publications), $28.95.

There was one downside to that fabled time in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed, giving rise to freedom within and to all its Bloc countries. The downside: We lost that genre of novel called the espionage thriller, with Russian agents working behind the scenes, whose sadism was scarcely more voluminous than their elegant subtlety (unless the mystery was of a vintage World War II era in which case Nazis made even more vile villains). Espionage writers could always fall back on Chinese communists, but even though we’d made of them real-life bogeymen during the Vietnam era, somehow they rarely translated as fictional baddies.

Now in real life we have terrorists, of course ­— more than we’ll ever need for espionage plotlines, but somehow they seem more murderous than nuanced. With the exception of 9/11 which was, for all its malevolence, truly, unprecedentedly, unimaginably and monumentally cunning, there is little a fictional terrorist can get himself up to. Mostly his manipulations involve convincing someone to rig himself or herself out with a bomb. This is a far cry from the suave Soviet spy of yore who posed as the ingenue’s long-lost uncle, wining her and dining her along the Boulevard St. Germaine, and urging her to steal documents from the U.S. Embassy she worked for . . . . you get the picture.

In short, the day after the Berlin Wall came down, the Eric Amblers, the Helen McGuinnesses and the Len Deightons may as well have been standing in the unemployment lines.

But now in Vineyard summer resident Harvey Stone’s new book, Melting Down, the Russians are back! And they’re nastier than ever. Not only that, the time era is the opposite of a period piece; in fact Mr. Stone has moved us forward four years when the world, to its mind-numbing detriment, has continued to permit the causative forces of global warming to foment to the point that melting glaciers are as common as dripping ice cream cones along the Jersey boardwalk.

Meanwhile a renegade group of fiendish Russians (note: It’s just a few rotten apples this time, not the whole barrel) has planted nukes under every glacier they can pinpoint on the global map. At the outset, you might ask yourself why they’re bothering to do this when the ice cap will be melting next week anyway, but there’s a clever reason for this devious plan, and far be it from this reviewer to give it away.

This book is tailor-made for the thriller crowd who loves its reading filled with more suspense than the original Die Hard movie with Bruce Willis. One might compare it to a roller coaster, only there are no slow upward grinds in the plot, only stomach churning plunges. The bad guys are really bad, meaning their business cards may as well read All Killing All the Time. (In old westerns it was said by professional scriptwriters that all the bad guys needed to do was to shoot a dog blocking their path to prove how gruesome they were; Mr. Stone has his evildoers salting bystanders away in the manner that the rest of us throw receipts in a drawer.)

President Charley Breen is a key good guy, kind of a Jimmy Carter cum Barack Obama with a bit more grit than both of them put together. His best friend is Tex Cassidy, half-cowboy, and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter who also knows how to land a solid punch when necessary. He mourns his late wife, but a living love interest presents herself, Zavia Jensen, who specializes in dikes and storm-surge barriers and all the other protection we’re going to need if these roguish Russians get their glaciers to go BOOM!

This is very much a guy book, every bit as much as a beach read about four girls sharing a summer rental and meeting lifeguard heartthrobs is rightly called a chick-lit novel. And by the way, all the chest stabs and car chases and assorted involuntary tonsillectomies are by no means the sum total of Melting Down: There are some sound points to be made about protecting our environment and keeping those polar ice caps intact. What this crass band of Russians is attempting to achieve in a countdown of a digital dial is a strong metaphor for what each and every one of us is doing by driving cars, smoking and eating the steaks that come from steers that pass way too much gas.

So, now that Hurricane a.k.a. Light Drizzle Irene has gone her way, we’ve got a few summer weeks left to enjoy. Grab a beach towel, a fold-up metal chair, a copy of Melting Down, and keep your eye on the sea level just in case coastal waters have picked that exact day to rise the projected 230 feet.