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.
Available on Kindle, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited
The city runs on attention. Jack Solano runs on instinct.
Jack Solano is a private detective in a near-future city where everyone is chipped at birth and every moment of focused attention converts to cash. It’s an economy built on theatre — and someone has found a way to steal from it.
When a bank analyst walks into Solano’s office with thirty-one accounts quietly bled for two years — and a dead colleague the coroner called natural causes — he follows the trail back to the institution where his own career ended, and the family whose name is on the building.
What begins as fraud becomes murder. And murder becomes something that could bring the entire city’s economy down.
Sci-fi noir in the tradition of the greats
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Chandler’s wit. Hammett’s economy. In a city run on theatre and theft.
Hardboiled tradition
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Rain-slicked streets, corrupt institutions, a wisecracking detective in a world one bad decision away from our own.
Near-future noir
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Readers of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and William Gibson’s Neuromancer will feel at home.
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About the book
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. The fraud is careful, patient, and almost invisible. The death was meant to be too.
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.
Seekers is a sci-fi noir novella — hardboiled detective fiction set in a near-future attention economy. It is the first case in The Solano Files series.
About the author
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 as a significant Australian work. Seekers is his debut novella.
He is actively working on further Solano Files cases and is open to conversations with agents and publishers.
Get your copy of Seekers
Available now on Kindle, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited.
More Solano Files cases in progress. See all Craig’s fiction →