Writing & Books

Speculative fiction spanning noir, sci-fi, horror & fantasy. Settings differ. Themes are similar: what happens to people when systems stop working as planned.


Published

The Solano Files, Book 1 · Sci-fi noir thriller · Debut novella · 15,799 words · May 2026

Seekers

Seekers by Craig Thomler—front cover

Everyone is chipped at birth. Every focused moment converts to cash. Jack Solano is a private detective in a city that runs on attention—and someone has found a way to steal it.

When a bank analyst walks into his office with thirty-one accounts quietly bled for two years—and a dead colleague the coroner called natural causes—Solano follows the trail back to the institution where his 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.

Seekers is sci-fi noir in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: rain-slicked streets, corrupt institutions, a wisecracking detective in a world one bad decision away from our own. Readers of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and William Gibson’s Neuromancer will feel at home.

A .38 locked in my desk for special occasions.

Available on Kindle Unlimited, Kindle and paperback—Buy on Amazon (AU) · Amazon (US)

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.

—Seekers, Chapter One

Read the full opening scene →

Craig is actively working on further Solano Files cases and is open to conversations with agents and publishers. Get in touch →


In progress

The Solano Files (series)

Jack Solano is a private eye in a near-future city where attention is the currency and everyone performs—for algorithms, for audiences, for themselves. The series takes the hardboiled detective tradition and drops it into an attention economy setting where surveillance is infrastructure and privacy a luxury good.
Seekers is the first story, but not Jack’s first case. More are in progress.

Signals (standalone hard SF)

From her command post beyond Neptune, Astrophysicist Elara Hargreaves watches the universe hesitate. The stars are disappearing from humanity’s records, but not the sky. Instruments disagree. Measurements refuse to settle. What begins as a technical anomaly becomes something more—a sense that the act of recording is changing what is being seen. As pressure mounts and systems collapse, Elara faces a choice between certainty and survival. Signals is a science fiction novel about what happens when the infrastructure we built to preserve truth starts telling a different story to our collective reality. In progress.

Humanity’s Womb (series)

A colony planet, cut off from Earth for three generations. Naturally born and vat-grown humans have built a fragile peace—different bodies, different childhoods, radically different ideas about what humanity should mean. When contact with Earth is finally re-established, neither side is prepared for what the other has become. The question isn’t which version of humanity survives. It’s whether the distinction was ever real. Early-stage series.


Prior work

Before fiction, Craig co-authored a dozen non-fiction how-to books and wrote for major newspapers, covering technology, digital culture and public affairs. His early works included titles in the Little Net.Guides series published by Bantam Books, and the Next Handbooks series by Next Publishing from 1996-2004. He contributed to the design of PC games, Submarine Titans and Ancient Conquest and designed card-based business tools, Social Media Planner and Sponsorship Planner. His award-winning eGovAU blog has been archived by the National Library of Australia as a significant Australian work.

Visit the eGovAU archive


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