Winters takes one element of our current society, individual's distrust of what their government tells them to be true, coupled with a distrust of what the media promotes as the truth, and spins the dystopic setting of Golden State, which appears to be southern California. Our individual-focused lives, a trend that evolved after the community-based lives of the fifties and decades before, lifestyles of the "greatest generation", is another outgrowth of increasing distrust of previously accepted truth-telling authority of government and media. The Golden State takes the need for an agreed-upon truth to the greatest extreme.

All individuals are required to keep a daily record of their activities, substantiated by stamps with those they interact with, keeping of receipts and any other written record of their day, kept in a personal archive. People address one another with "flat facts", indisputable truths: "two plus two is four", "so it is, and always shall be so." It sounds like the call and response of community prayer. The daily newspaper is The Trusted Authority, part of the archive of truth known as Objectively So. Fiction novels are illegal; what passes for novels are nonfiction stories. Even television is the viewing of themed live video streams, since video recording is everywhere, all part of the truth archive. Our protagonist, Laszlo Ratesic, is a member of a special detective force, a Speculator, one of an elite group allowed to imagine possibilities, for purposes of solving major crimes like murder. Speculators appear to possess an ability to sense anomaly, incongruities in the truth of a circumstance. They sense untruths in a personal, sensory experience, like a sixth sense.

Laszlo lives in the shadow of his brother, a legendary Speculator, who died under mysterious circumstances, while fearlessly pursuing the truth. Laszlo always feels inadequate in that shadow, yet he is nonetheless highly respected. He refers to himself as a big bear, taking up too much space, a coarsely bearded, overweight, poorly groomed man, who has a failed marriage, and not much of a life beyond work, except for his love of food. Laszlo is given an assignment to investigate the death of a roofer, who fell off of a roof; at the same time, he is assigned a mentee, Aysa Paige, a gifted Speculator fresh from the academy. Laszlo's senior Speculator, Arlo Vasoulian, insists that Laszlo is the perfect Speculator to mentor her, due to his more careful approach.

As Laszlo investigates this death, with the extremely able assistance of Paige, he comes to believe that he has uncovered an underground network of resistance to the government structure that reaches the highest levels, and even believes that his brother attempted to uncover this, which led to his death. When Laszlo is betrayed by his own trusted supervisor, Arlo, and sent in exile-- driven to the desert east of the Golden State and abandoned-- we fear this could be his end. In a quirky twist of fate, Laszlo makes his way to Las Vegas, where he reunites with his brother, and finds the remnants of another surviving community. Both Las Vegas and the Golden State appear to be remnant communities of a terrible apocalyptic attack on the United States, from which we could not recover intact due to the levels of distrust in society. It is a neat finish, almost a little too neat.

Winter does not disappoint, with his characteristic inventiveness, and wonderful gift for black humor and sarcastic turns of phrase. See my review of his novel The Last Policeman, for more of the same. While the ending of this book falls a little flat, it is overall a great development of the premise of what happens to a society that becomes unmoored from the truth, and cannot find its way back.