Lock In by John Scalzi

 

If I tell you this is basically a mystery in near-future-SF dress, that might surprise you (if you know who John Scalzi is) until/unless I also mention that when he started writing fiction he basically coinflipped between Mystery and SF; at that point it might make perfect sense. This is a really good novel, with some interesting thematic resonances mostly centering on free-will and the intersections of wealth and power, with various subthreads on regulatory capture and the way the Diné have been misused and abused and ignored by the US government over history. It's ten-year-old Scalzi (wow!) at this point, and it's not so breezy as some of his more recent stuff, and I know he's said before that hearing the audiobook of a novel has led him to at least mostly drop dialogue tags ("he said") and I gotta say the dialogue tags jumped off the page at me as I was reading this, so this might have been that novel/audiobook; but it's very readable and a blast.