FATAL Discontinuity

by Susan Trott

Cover design by
Susan TrottIn police detective work, the continuity of the chain of evidence is everything. When that chain is broken, details are lost, misaligned, dismissed, or missed entirely. When that happens, it becomes a discontinuity — a break in the record where truth can disappear.

The newly installed law-enforcement AI system, LANTERN, was designed to find what human investigators miss. For months, it has quietly searched old files, active cases, forensic reports, and sealed records, drawing connections no one else had seen.

Detective Daniel Mercer has built his career on instinct, patience, and the uneasy knowledge that easy answers are often wrong. When LANTERN begins surfacing links between unrelated deaths, closed files, and jurisdictional gaps, Mercer sees something the system cannot explain: a pattern built from interruption.

As Mercer and Detective Bennett follow the chain across precincts, archives, hospitals, legal records, and cold cases, every answer exposes another break. Someone has learned how to exploit the places where systems fail to see each other.

And in those gaps, truth has been disappearing for years.

750 pages, Paperback

Published June 21, 2026

About the author

Susan Trott is a Canadian author whose work spans visionary eco-fiction, science fiction, cozy romance, memoir, and myth-infused nature writing. Through her independent imprint Tagger Press, she creates stories that explore the quiet magic of the natural world, the resilience of ordinary people, and the threads of meaning that connect past and future.

She is the author of The Oak Witness, King of Dams, CAPPED, Escape, The Cedar Hollow Series: Snowfall in Cedar Hollow, The Undelivered Roses, and Noínín's Wish.

Her writing blends emotional depth with imaginative world-building — from near-future thrillers to ancient alien civilizations to gentle, heartwarming tales of small-town life.

A lifelong animal guardian and dedicated “cat lady,” she lives with her husband Jim and a multigenerational feline family in Ottawa, where fresh snow, koi ponds, and the quiet presence of trees often find their way into her stories.

Reviews

[Ruth Coulson]

If you have ever become concerned about the possibility of AI overreach, or of it being converted and used by criminals for their own profit, then this book is your vindication. Or a warning. It is set in the near future, and that makes it even more plausible and frightening.

For policing, what could be more useful than a system that can compare details across different cases and even different jurisdictions, finding hidden parallels leading to the solving of difficult cases. The system was introduced and called Lantern. The immediate interface used by the police is called Clara. It seemed wonderfully useful. And then "red flags" of worry began appearing. Followed by the first deaths. Or corrections. Detectives Mercer and Bennet are sufficiently concerned to start a private investigation. They collect a number of other interested parties as the book progresses. Their path towards deduction is the main part of the book. After what seems like an intentionally slow start, there are some real nail-biting moments. Their evidence mounts and push-back from those who are using Lantern/Clara for their own ends becomes real opposition.

I did find the book to be hard going to start with. Phrases like these returned by Clara: Live Recurrence Event Detected, Correlation Density Increase: 340%, Cross-Jurisdictional Recurrence Structures Stabilising, Personnel Discontinuity Association Confidence Elevated, and Additional Access Required for Continuity Resolution are heavy, opaque and off-putting. But that is the messaging of the system. It somehow seems less intrusive in the later parts of the book.

The language, especially the dialogue, is terse, fragmentary and utterly real. It mirrors the form of the electronic messages from Clara, becoming ever more so as the tension increases, with the novel winding towards its crescendo.

It is a book that may make you decide to keep your landline, to use your filing cabinet rather than the cloud, and to make personal and private connections where possible. If it makes you think about that it may have fulfilled some part of its purpose.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Peggy]

This book will make me think for a long time. Progress, purpose, and ethics wrapped with AI at its source. Mostly one, long day for two detectives who advocated and removed emotion to bring forth a logical crime that kept getting ahead of them with each new aspect. The supporting characters who helped gather and preserve evidence were well developed and integrated with the main characters. I can't pick a favorite; I liked all of them.
Makes me want a landline again and maybe a fax machine. Certainly makes me appreciate paper and pen versus backups and digital restoration.
I really admire Trott's ability to use words to evoke logic, sequence and emotion. Liked Capped; loved Fatal Discontinuity. Can't wait to read what's next.
I received an advanced copy of this book for free; it is my honest review.