Matthew Glass has obviously dreamt of being a speechwriter for an American president. He is very good at it. In Ultimatum (Atlantic, £9.99 £9.49; Buy this book, 400pp) his speeches are put into the mouth of Joe Benton, newly elected in a climate crisis-hit world of 2032, have the right feel, the right cadences, the right mix of hope and hokum.

Hours after his election Benton is given news, already in the possession of his crusty Republican predecessor, that the world is facing climate catastrophe, much worse and much sooner than anyone predicted. This is at a time when southern California is turning into a desert, while inundation and hurricanes have made much of the Gulf coast uninhabitable. Benton is already working on a mammoth human resettlement plan known as New Foundation.

Now he realises that the only hope is for emission cuts on a previously unimagined scale. Faced with the creeping inertia of endless “Kyoto” talks, Benton knows that immediate, drastic action must be taken by the two countries who might suffer most but are also most to blame: the US and China. His response is a carbon plan to which he must persuade or force China to sign up so that the two countries can strong-arm the rest of the world into line.

That’s the background. The rest of the book, bar the final few dozen pages, is taken up with endless diplomatic wrangling that reads like it sounds: endless diplomatic wrangling. Except for the speeches, of course. We get those nearly in full, which is fascinating if you’re a student of US presidential rhetoric, but a bit dull if you’re hoping for a thriller.

Glass’s publishers have hyped him as the “new Tom Clancy”, but Clancy would have had us jumping to subplots all over the world, with outbursts of unexpected random violence, corner-turning cliffhangers and hardware techy-talk.

Glass just gives us talk, and more talk, until right near the end when both sides go ballistic. Literally. Maybe this is like climate change itself: people bore the pants off us talking about it for what seems like ages, then catastrophe hits us all at once. But that is a cautionary tale, not a thriller. Meanwhile, if Glass does get offered that speechwriting role, he should take it.

There is no shortage of events and the grand sweep in Dan Fesperman’s The Arms Maker of Berlin (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99, Buy this book, 384pp)This is a worthy and ambitious tour of German history from 1941 to 2009 that hangs on an American academic tracing the life of a colleague and former Second World War spy.

When his mentor is arrested on suspicion of stealing classified government documents, then suddenly dies in custody, Professor Nat Turnbull sets out to find why everybody, from the CIA and the FBI to an attractive young German academic, wants to trace his history. The story that emerges, told in a parallel 1940s timeframe, is of blighted love affairs, misguided treachery and lifetimes of blackmail and intrigue.

Fesperman’s determination to make the tale fit the thriller mould leads it to tortuous quests and a promise of a secret that could “threaten the whole world”, which disappears up its own McGuffin. But this is a good, intelligent book, marred only slightly by the genre into which it is squeezed.

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