David J. Avila

Detective Stan Prolongo didn't expect much from a stolen unicycle case. A report, maybe. Some paperwork. What he didn't expect was a missing princess whose wooden likeness would end up in his pocket for the rest of the investigation. Set in the sun-bleached, quietly surreal Central Valley of California, The Hen-ch Co. Conspiracy follows Prolongo and his partner Justin Thyme - a man who doesn't own a cell phone, learning binary, and is apparently royalty - through a case that begins with a unicycle and ends with a clone.
Between those two points: a surveillance state built from chicken technology, a senator with too many secrets and not enough grief, a trans man named Dusty who wanted nothing more than to disappear into a new life, a mother who prepared her son for exactly this moment, and a person of interest the two detectives can just pin down. Funny, strange, and quietly devastating, Tortuga, Book One of The Hen-ch Co.
Conspiracy is a detective novel about who gets to name you, who gets to watch you, and what it costs to tell the truth in a world where the chickens have ears.