COMING IN 2026!
Timothy Splashinski is a janitor who believes the government is enhancing otters. He has 847 pages of documentation, a diving mask from Walmart, and the unshakeable conviction of a man who has been right about everything his entire life and wrong about how to make anyone believe him. When he breaks into the Happy Waves Aquarium at 2 AM to rescue two river otters named Olive and Otis, he sets off a chain of events that will expose a fifty-year conspiracy, destroy seventeen hundred jobs, and force a federal judge to rule on whether consciousness can be classified.
He’s not alone. There’s Brandy Mannschaft, an efficiency consultant whose brain calculates seventeen ways any situation can go catastrophically wrong (she’s usually right about all of them). There’s Trout Bowman, a former FBI consultant whose synesthesia lets him taste danger—and right now, everything tastes like pennies. There’s Marcus Rodriguez, a sixty-two-year-old security guard who has to choose between his wife’s cancer treatment and telling the truth. And there are the otters themselves, who have been arranging pebbles in patterns that spell out words in a language no one taught them.
What follows is a satire about conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, institutions that would rather let people die than admit wrongdoing, and the impossible math of being right when the cost of proof is everything you have. It’s the funniest book you’ll ever read about government-enhanced otters, dead children, and the specific taste of copper that means someone is about to destroy your life. Fans of Christopher Moore, Douglas Adams, and anyone who’s ever suspected the bureaucracy was hiding something will find exactly what they’re looking for—and immediately wish they hadn’t.