The Halter

Combining the comic absurdity of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub with the inventive worldbuilding of Philip K. Dick and the elegiac longing of Raymond Chandler, The Halter is a debut sci-fi novel that fuses cyber-noir, psychological suspense, and high-concept speculation in a breakneck search for truth inside a utopian metaverse on the verge of collapse 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 surrogate reality project called The Forum. Entering under an assumed identity, Kennedy finds a simulation unlike any other. The Forum bills itself as a tool for cutting-edge scientific research and radical philosophical investigations, but the signs of its corruption are everywhere. As Kennedy investigates, he learns Delia had been working on a new simulation that could upend The Forum’s primary purpose, and that even in this prurient playground for the super wealthy, the dangers are very real.