Lazlo Ratesic (what a name!) is a detective in the Speculative Service, a law enforcement agency in what is called the Golden State, which seems like a future version of California. In the Golden State, truth is king and lying is illegal. Everyone greets each other with facts (i.e., "two plus two is four and always will be,"), and everyone is surveilled via video and personal note-taking. Ratesic, a veteran officer who enforces the truth, has a natural power to suss out lies, and has the right to speculate or guess as to what happened in criminal cases, may have encountered a conspiracy, and the reader follows his path towards truths hidden and realized. This is definitely not a book I would've picked up if it wasn't in the Tournament of Books, but I'm so glad I did.

Like many books in the Tournament this year, it's a novel concerned with truth and perception. It's a damn good novel, and the audiobook narrator made me laugh and was the perfect gruff voice to the proceedings at hand. I think, even, that if it were not for VandenHeuval's specific voice, I may not have liked this book in print AS MUCH. He comes off as hard-boiled but as Ratesic discovers not only things that are deeply troubling, but wonderfully joyous (a fiction novel that is banned because fiction is LIES!), the narration really kept me going. The book’s themes play so well, though there was some convoluted points near the end where I said out loud in my car “wait, wait, wait, what?!” I will say, if I were to give superlatives at the end of the year, I think this would be the current contender for "best last line." I picked up the physical book in a store the other day and reread that last line again with pleasure, and maybe some wet eyes.

I might try more Winters in the future, who knows. But for speculative fiction, this book certainly won me over.