Green City Wars

Skotch is a raccoon and a private investigator. He works in a city of the future where humans live in the sunlight of solar towers and genetically engineered animals, the Little Helpers, keep everything running below them, unseen and unheard. Skotch takes cases for a few buttons, so long as the job is not too illegal.

His new case looks small: a mouse has gone missing. Yet the mouse carries something that a lot of people want, and nobody will say what it is. The fee on offer is generous, perhaps too generous, and Skotch has little room to turn it down.

The book is an adult noir in which every character is an animal, a hard-boiled detective story set in the underworld beneath the human city. The premise pairs the private-eye tradition of Philip Marlowe with the animal society of Redwall, and the tone is that of a classic investigator working a case that grows darker as it goes.

Skotch has three things to work out: where the mouse is hiding, what he is hiding, and why his secrets have stirred up so many animals caught in the Green City wars. Until he knows, he is working for a client he cannot read.