SIMON J CLEARY

@simon · since 2026

Simon J. Cleary is an Irish-born writer and entrepreneur based in Vancouver. His lifelong habit of watching how institutions shape (and erase) ordinary lives eventually produced Duke Savage who finds the institutional mechanism underneath the public event that everyone else has been organised not to see. Ghosts in the Ash began as a conspiracy thriller and became, across thirteen months, a literary crime novel about administrative violence and the cost of being someone’s father.

Duke Savage is fifty-three, an ex-journalist turned analog private investigator operating above a pawnshop in Los Angeles — managing a fentanyl addiction, a 3am tremor, and four unanswered calls to his daughter. When an encrypted message arrives warning that a young woman is running out of time, Duke takes what appears to be a routine missing-person case. He discovers he wasn’t hired to find her. He was selected as an instrument by a client who spent four years engineering the moment — because in a war fought with algorithms and administrative cascades, Duke Savage is the one variable the system cannot quietly resolve.

GHOSTS IN THE ASH: A DUKE SAVAGE NOVEL

SIMON J CLEARY

2 scenes · ongoing