Tortuga

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. David J. Avila writes bizarre and emotionally exhausting short stories and novelettes that defy easy categorization. His work exists in the uncomfortable spaces between absurdist fiction, dark fantasy, and psychological horror-the kind of stories that didn't have a place in the grade school classrooms where he first fell in love with writing.Avila's fiction takes familiar frameworks-fairy tales, magical realism, everyday objects and twists them until they reveal something raw and unsettling about violence, belief, and human desperation. His characters navigate worlds where toasters perform miracles, unicorns seek revenge, and the line between the mundane and the impossible dissolves completely.With five short stories currently available, Avila continues to explore the darker corners of imagination from his home in California's San Joaquin Valley, crafting tales that linger long after the final page.