THE SOLANO FILES · BOOK ONE
SEEKERS
Everyone is chipped at birth. Every focused moment converts to cash.
Someone has found a way to steal it.
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THE WORLD
Every citizen is chipped at birth. Attention is the only currency that matters.
THE ECONOMY
Every moment of focus converts to credits. The city runs on it — and always has.
THE CRIME
Someone found a way to drain it. Someone else found the body. Jack Solano found the case.
THE DETECTIVE
Meet Jack Solano
Name
Jack Solano
Occupation
Private Investigator
Office
Fourth Floor, Crane & Ellery
Current Case
Thirty-one accounts. All bleeding credits they shouldn’t be.
Jack Solano used to work inside the system. He knows how the attention economy runs, who it rewards, and how the numbers are supposed to add up.
Now he works out of a fourth-floor office that still takes cash. Two chairs, one desk, one window — and a .38 in the drawer for special occasions.
When a bank analyst drops a stack of account files on his desk — and a dead colleague the coroner signed off too quickly — he starts asking the questions no one else is asking.
THE GENRE
Sci-Fi Noir in the Tradition of the Greats
HARDBOILED TRADITION
Rain-slicked streets. Corrupt institutions. A wisecracking detective in a world one bad decision away from our own.
NEAR-FUTURE NOIR
The attention economy is already here. Seekers imagines what happens when someone figures out how to steal it.
CLASSIC INFLUENCES
Chandler’s wit. Hammett’s economy. Gibson’s world-building. Morgan’s edge.
FANS OF
Raymond Chandler · William Gibson · Richard Morgan · Philip K. Dick · Neal Stephenson
THE OPENING
Chapter One
The city never sleeps, which is bad for the city and good for me. Tired people make mistakes. I’ve built a career on other people’s insomnia.
My name is Jack. Jack Solano. I work out of a fourth-floor office on the corner of Crane and Ellery. Two chairs, one desk, one window, and a crack in the ceiling that’s been heading north for eleven months. I call it my longest relationship.
I was watching the crack when she walked in.
Available on Kindle, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited
THE BOOK
About Seekers
The city is built on attention. Every chip records it, every platform monetises it, every institution depends on it. The economy doesn’t run on labour or capital — it runs on the clean, quantified output of the human mind.
Jack Solano used to work inside that system. Now he works around the edges of it — a private detective whose case files run from missing persons to insurance fraud, and whose office is in a building that still takes cash.
When a bank analyst named Mira Chen walks into his office, she brings him two things: a data anomaly that stretches back two years across thirty-one accounts, and a dead colleague the coroner signed off without asking the right questions.
Following the trail leads Solano back to the Harlow Bank — where he once worked, where his career ended badly — and to the Harlow family, whose name is still above the door. What looks like clever theft becomes something larger. And what looks like an isolated murder becomes a mechanism.
THE AUTHOR
About Craig Thomler
Craig Thomler spent twenty years writing about technology before he started writing about what technology does to people. He is an AI and digital transformation specialist based in Canberra, Australia, whose professional work has taken him across government, consulting, and startups on three continents.
Before fiction, Craig co-authored fifteen non-fiction books, wrote for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and founded the award-winning eGovAU blog — preserved by the National Library of Australia. Seekers is his debut novella.
THE NEXT CASE
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