Created by Stephen Randle
“I could quite literally throw a stone from my front steps and hit the Lower City below, and I had done it a few times just to prove it was possible.”
In what they’re tagging a “gritty YA urban fantasy novel” set following a “climate apocalypse,” Canada’s Hamilton, Ontario is sinking and 23-year-old private investigator COOPER HART can’t even swim.
He’s trying to carve out a living, but it’s not easy. Much of the time, he operates as a sort of “Lost and Found” for people, mostly former Lower City residents, who had left things behind in their initial panic to escape the rising waters.
So he’s not being particularly picky if some of the cases that come his way pass the smell test or not.
Which is how he becomes involved with Tara, an odd young girl who wants him to find her missing twin brother Travis — and how he inadvertently gets tangled up with local crime boss Frankie Ciccone, who wants the young sleuth to forget Tara’s case, and look into the killing of several of the workers at one of his warehouses.
So far, you’ve probably seen most of it before, but the author’s world-building is genuinely impressive, with the once thriving steel town and literary hub of Hamilton now besieged by the rising waters of Lake Ontario, and sliced into three distinct sections: the dangerous Lower City, where the rising waters of Lake Ontario lap against the bruised and broken residents who are lorded over by Ciccone, his goons and a police force that gave up trying long ago; the Outskirts, a nominally safer, struggling working class neighbourhood, and the Upper City, where the protected and privileged can rest safe and easy, peering down on the less fortunate from high atop the Niagara Escarpment.
Thanks to a rare bit of luck (and well-off parents), Cooper owns a small, “not-quite-shabby two-storey building that houses (a) combined office and living quarters in The Outskirts… which ran as close to the edge of the Niagara escarpment as you could get without falling off.”
“But still too close to the water,” he adds, “to make anyone feel secure.”
But just to add to the fun, while pursuing the two cases, Cooper stumbles upon a bunch of folks who may be — or may not be — part of some kind of ancient cult.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Waterloo, Ontario’s Stephen Randle began reading and writing at a very young age, mostly in the fantasy genre, and earned two university degrees, one in Computer Science and one in English, which explains why he is works in the kitchen at a local pub and uses his days off to write. Trace Evidence is his debut novel.
NOVELS
- Trace Evidence (2026) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- On tari-ari-ari-Eyes
Eyes from Canada’s Second Largest Province - I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
Things That Go Bump in the Night, and the Eyes Who Go After Them
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
