Buy the Book:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Published by: Zero Day Books, LLC
Release Date: September 23, 2025
Pages: 353
ASIN: B0FGHNK279

 
A dark, high-stakes corporate thriller for fans of Blake Crouch, JP Delaney, and The Circle.

Fresh out of Harvard Business School, Kayla Mousavi lands her dream job at General Recycling, a Silicon Valley–style tech company hailed as “the future of clean energy.” Working directly under the legendary CEO Frederick Douglass Monahan, Kayla believes she’s helping save the planet. GR’s revolutionary trash-eating bacteria promise to end the global waste crisis and make her one of the youngest rising stars in the corporate world.

But inside every great company lies a great crime.

When Kayla uncovers data that doesn’t add up—and a horrifying secret buried in the company’s labs—she becomes a target. The closer she gets to the truth, the deadlier the lies become. Soon, she witnesses a professional hit—a hit meant for her—and realizes the company she trusted is hiding something far worse than financial fraud.

Now, hunted by a ruthless tech visionary with limitless power, Kayla must outsmart a man who intends to change the world—just not as advertised.

A tense, fast-paced thriller about ambition, corruption, and the price of progress, THE GARBAGE MAN explores what happens when innovation crosses the line into madness.

 

Add on Goodreads

---

 

 

A note about the significance of the Matrix imagery on the cover

- One of the perks at General Recycling, the company in The Garbage Man, is a highly realistic metaverse that users experience in a wildly advanced gaming arena. This experience is called Resilusio (from the Latin - “The Real Illusion”).
- One of the “hosts” of the experience describes Resilusio as “The Matrix … minus the giant machines that harvest humans.”
-Resilusio takes data collected from a person’s garbage (and any other sources) and uses it to make a bespoke, highly addictive experience very similar to heroin.
- It is so addictive that many users risk death - and some die - rather than leave the world.
- Kayla experiences Resilusio multiple times in the book, and it is exactly as described.