The Pursuits of Stephen Hayes

Everyone has a tell. Even an artificial intelligence.

Across twenty interconnected mysteries set in Ontario's cottage country, Stephen Hayes follows the clues others overlook. A former teacher and professional mentalist in his early sixties, he knows how easily attention can be steered - and how much a silence and observation can reveal.

In his ear is AIsha: fast, incisive, searching thousands of records in milliseconds, hearing the fractional pause that betrays a lie. She is also the one narrating - and she cannot see, cannot always tell fear from excitement, and grows increasingly uncertain about the difference between understanding people and caring for them.

With Detective Sergeant Grace Odell - methodical, experienced, and annoyingly aware that Hayes's "hearing aid" is doing rather more than amplifying conversation - they pursue the human truth behind the official record: an impossible card at Casino Rama, a vanished armoured vehicle, disputed Tom Thomson paintings, a death at the Orillia Opera House, a body in a Creemore brewery.

This is recognizably descended from Sherlock Holmes, but this is not mere pastiche. It is the Holmes-Watson partnership rebuilt for the age of machine inference - where the machine knows more, the human understands more, and both are capable of being dangerously wrong.

At the centre of it stands Hayes himself: a man whose gravest mistake is neither revealed or excused, but carried openly through every case. Because insight does not erase harm - and a person may become useful without becoming innocent.

James Biss is a Canadian mental health advocate, theatrical creator and mentalist who has spent four decades studying how people are persuaded, deceived, and astonished. He is the internationally acclaimed Sherlockian behind the Finding Sherlock Holmes series. The Pursuits of Stephen Hayes is his most daring creation yet.

The local mysteries may be solved. The larger pursuit has only begun.