The novel Jaw Filler by Maz Murray and Charlie Markbreiter reimagines classic crime tropes inside a distinctly modern setting. This piece opens by placing a missing-person case and a tough investigator into the heart of the transmasculine internet, where community, identity and commerce collide. The opening scene shared here centers on a recruiter’s approach to a creator whose virtual neighborhood in Sims World has begun to function as a real-world hub for peer support and shared knowledge.
Rather than a conventional urban alley, the environment is constructed in code: an virtual commune where people gather, roleplay and exchange resources. The excerpt focuses on a single conversation between Kevin, a trans influencer who built the neighborhood, and Taylor, a representative from a tech firm called VSI. Their small, intimate encounter mixes attraction, labor, and a business proposition that promises new forms of access to care — or at least the illusion of it.
How the novel reframes noir
At its core, Jaw Filler borrows noir staples — a driven investigator, a disappearance, and ambiguous loyalties — and relocates them to digital milieus where visibility and identity are constantly negotiated. Detective Sean Hastings becomes the reader’s entry point into an ecosystem where a missing trans man’s absence echoes beyond friends and family into the architecture of online life. The book treats the transmasculine internet as both backdrop and protagonist: it shapes motives, provides alibis and complicates jurisdiction for anyone trying to trace a person who can exist across platforms.
A charged encounter: Taylor’s pitch to Kevin
The excerpt dramatizes a quiet, charged meeting. Kevin’s narration captures the ordinary textures of queer social life — thrift shopping, bubble tea, shared dentist or surgeon anecdotes — while juxtaposing them with the extraordinary proposition Taylor brings. Taylor’s outreach is casual yet strategic: he works for VSI, a company positioning itself as a corporate solution to gaps in access created by restrictive policy. The dialogue balances flirtation, professional purpose and the uneasy comfort of mutual recognition between trans people who know the same clinical networks, such as a shared bottom surgeon.
The nature of the offer
Taylor frames the company’s plan as pragmatic: create options where public systems fail. He calls it optionality while acknowledging that a private program is no substitute for universal policy changes. The pitch lands in a liminal space — attractive to creators because it promises resources, yet politically fraught because corporate programs can never fully replace systemic protections like expanded public healthcare. Their exchange captures how contemporary community-building often involves negotiating support from imperfect sources.
Small moments, larger stakes
Personal details in the scene — a neon green lighter, the rhythm of adjacent knees, a passing joint — function as grounding images that make the stakes feel immediate. Kevin’s ambivalence about visibility, his recent discovery of his bisexuality and his calculation about when to disclose personal identity for engagement mirror broader themes: what is shared for safety, what is monetized for reach, and how intimacy can become entangled with career and activism. Moments that read like dates become recruitment opportunities, and vice versa.
Why setting and tone matter
Placing a detective story inside a constructed neighborhood in Sims World does more than update aesthetics: it foregrounds how virtual spaces serve as lifelines. The novel interrogates notions of community, care and surveillance, asking whether an online commune can substitute in any meaningful way for structural support. The tension between corporate solutions and collective demands is threaded through the narrative: characters debate whether a company like VSI is a pragmatic ally or a commodifier of urgent needs.
A final image
The excerpt closes on a disorienting, intimate domestic moment: Kevin blacks out after a night out and later wakes alone with his Sim World open on a screen. That image compresses the book’s concerns — the porous boundary between private life and public persona, the aftereffects of encounters that mix desire and work, and the unreliability of both memory and platform-based community. Jaw Filler thus reads as both a thriller and a study of contemporary social infrastructure.
The novel is available from Montez Press, and this excerpt originally accompanied coverage from Them. For readers interested in Queer culture, platform economies and speculative crime, the opening pages signal a book that treats internet spaces as living terrain for mystery, politics and intimate revelation.