Simmons Dan. Flashback

A Novel. — New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2012. — 568 p. — ISBN: 978-0-316-00696-5.Some twenty years from now, the United States is near total collapse. But 85 percent of the population doesn’t care: They're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to reexperience the best moments of their lives. After former detective Nick Bottom’s wife died in a car accident, he started going under the flash to be with her; now an addict, he’s lost his job and is estranged from his teenage son.
Nick may be a tortured soul, but he’s stilly good cop, so he’s hired by a top government advisor to investigate the murder of the advisor’s son. Soon Nick becomes the one man who can change the course of an entire nation turning away from tomorrow to live in the past.
Flashback is provocative fiction set in a future that seems eerily possible, a novel that proves Dan Simmons is one of our most exciting and versatile writers.