Golden State

I just loved the premise of this book by Ben Winter,  i.e., "In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, a nation standing where California once did, a place where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life and governance impossible." But I felt that it sort of fizzled out after a very confusing reveal. According to his website, Winter is a "data scientist working in the mobile technology industry..." who writes futuristic dystopias. 

Publishers Weekly offers a brief storyline which goes " in the near future, California is a sovereign state governed by absolute truth, and telling a lie can result in jail time or worse. Laszlo Ratesic, a veteran police officer whose innate ability to know when someone is lying helps him piece together unsolved crimes, investigates the death of a construction worker who fell off of a roof during a job. The seemingly accidental fatality is filled with anomalies, which leads Ratesic and the young female officer he’s mentoring to uncover a grand-scale conspiracy with staggering implications." One of those anomalies is a novel hidden inside the cover of a dictionary that Lazlo and partner find in the victim's apartment. Of course novels (being fiction) are strictly forbidden reading. Lazlo believes in the premise of the Golden State until he finds himself unexplainably drawn into reading the novel. I can't say much more about the plot without spoiling some of the surprising twists and turns. In the end, Publishers Weekly was disappointed, concluding that "Winters’s exploration into the nature of truth will grip many readers, but this ambitious novel misses the mark." Kirkus, on the other hand, offers a more favorable recommendation, "it’s still a skillful and swift-moving concoction. For those who like their dystopias with a dash of humor. No lie." I would agree with Kirkus' comparison to author Philip K. Dick's novels (e.g. he wrote the novels on which the movies Blade Runner and Minority Report were based.) Whereas the Library Journal compares his work to other famous dystopian authors, saying "VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of dystopian fiction, especially those who enjoy classics of the genre, such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World."