Gronk: Caveman Detective. The Case Of No Credit!. Gronk: Caveman Detective, #2

A love letter to Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Lawrence Block. Stuffed into one envelope because postage is expensive. What happens when you mix Pratchett's humanism, Adams's cosmic absurdity, and Block's hard-boiled resilience? You get the world's first (and possibly only) comedic-philosophical caveman noir. Welcome to the dawn of civilization. It's already broken. Gronk invented fire. He also invented the rule that keeps civilization from eating itself: Don't kill the people who keep things running.
It worked for five whole cycles. Then someone broke it. Murdered the man who ran the GoUpNoClimb system. Repeatedly. With enthusiasm. Now CaveGoUp is all guilds and councils and NoBonks patrolling with dinosaur bones, all credit and sophisticated financial instruments nobody understands. Everyone's getting vertical. Everyone's very pleased with themselves. And something is coming from outside. Something that doesn't care about any of it.
Something that believes in a much simpler economy. Something the sophisticated people forgot existed while they were busy charging chickens for interpretations. Gronk is a detective. He solves things. But this isn't a solving problem anymore. This is a getting up problem. And Gronk only has one skill that matters: He knows how to get up. One more time. Always one more time. Everyone pays eventually.
Only there's something in the valley that doesn't believe in rules. Or guilds. Or councils. Or NoBonks with dinosaur bones. Or credit, or sophistication, or any of the things CaveGoUp thinks make it civilized. And it's coming to collect.