Combining the comic absurdity of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub with the inventive worldbuilding of Phillip K. Dick and the elegiac longing of Raymond Chandler, The Halter is a debut sci-fi noir and the first in a series that takes a skeptical look at our unshakable appetite for escapism, featuring a compelling detective, a frustrated genius, and a utopian metaverse on the verge of collapse.

A mind-bending sci-fi thriller, The Halter fuses cyber-noir, psychological suspense, and high-concept speculation into a breakneck search for truth inside a world built on lies.

In a world where virtual addiction kills, Kennedy Stark is paid to pull the plug. A professional halter—part detective, part counselor—he trawls the world’s darkest surrogate-reality feeds in search of the lost. When he isn’t working, he’s dreaming of a one-way ticket to Mars, where a new colony has been established as a hopeful alternative to an Earth in the early stages of climate collapse.

One evening, after a botched rescue attempt, a mysterious client offers Kennedy a tantalizing new case: brilliant software engineer Delia Walsh, who Kennedy fell in love with years ago, has disappeared inside a secret surrogate reality project called The Forum. Entering under an assumed identity, Kennedy finds a surrogate reality simulation unlike any he has ever seen. The Forum bills itself as a tool for bleeding-edge scientific research and radical philosophical investigations, but the signs of its corruption are everywhere. Day by day, The Forum is devolving into a prurient playground for the world’s monied elite.

Before her disappearance, Delia had been working on a groundbreaking new simulation that threatened to upend The Forum’s primary purpose. Her friends, her colleagues, and even the FBI are looking for her, and whoever finds her first, will discover The Forum’s strangest secret yet…