The Eden Protocol: A Climate-Tech Mystery

In a city designed for perfection, the most serious crimes aren't about breaking the law. They're about breaking the promise. Solara is the world's first carbon-negative megacity. A floating ark of vertical forests, orbital solar arrays, and algae farms, built on the promise that humanity can engineer a better future. For climate-forensic investigator Kaelen Dray, it's also the city that chewed them up and spat them out. Four years ago, Kaelen walked away from the Solara Biosecurity Authority after their mentor authorized a cover-up. Now they work out of a refrigerated shipping container in the Low Docks, chasing minor contamination disputes and trying to forget. Then the Eden Vertical Forest Complex calls. Dr. Ravi Nkosi, a young botanist who talked to his plants and drank extra ginger chai at the dockside stall, is dead inside a sealed research biome. Cause unknown. The surveillance logs are corrupted. His body is arranged with care, suggesting ritual rather than accident. The only person with full access to the crime scene is the woman who destroyed Kaelen's career: Dr. Ozioma Keita, the Chief Botanist and their former mentor. The deeper Kaelen digs, the stranger the case grows. The organism that killed Ravi shouldn't exist. Its genetic code matches nothing in any database, yet its carbon signature places it four hundred million years in the past. Someone has resurrected an extinct species and weaponized it. Ravi discovered the truth before he died. He tried to stop it alone. The evidence he left behind points to a conspiracy that reaches far beyond one death, one lab, one city. Forced to partner with Lian Zheng, a marine engineer grieving the man she never told she loved, Kaelen must navigate a web of corrupt officials, whistleblowers hiding in the city's underground data network, and a shadowy organization that believes democracy is too slow to save the planet. The weapon is already in the ventilation system. The clock is ticking. And Ozioma Keita is still inside Eden, watching, waiting, ready to welcome her former protégé home. The Eden Protocol launches the Solara Files, a solarpunk climate-tech mystery-thriller series set in a near-future world where the technology that sustains utopia is also the perfect instrument for the perfect crime. For readers who want their detectives sharp, their science grounded, and their hope hard-won.

Pagina's: 259, Paperback, Independently published