Review: Truth: a Conspiratorium novel

Linda A Sanchez, Truth: a Conspiratorium novel, (Legacy & Light Publishing, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238981995-truth

AI gone mad, a computer-driven conspiracy of deepfakery

Caleb waits at a diner for a contact who had ‘promised him everything: proof, files, locations’. No one arrived. Only a phone message, ‘look under the red newspaper box’. He goes outside to look. It’s a silver metal case, sealed in duct tape. He peels off the tape to reveal etched on the case, ‘you were right’.

The next phone message reads, ‘the Red Vault is open’. An old myth, a ‘dump of industry blackmail’. Inside the case is a hard drive, a key engraved with the number 73, and a message on a white card: ‘Caleb, the Red Vault is real. Just follow the chain, connect the rooms’. Signed V.C. He knew who it was—Vera Cross. She’d disappeared right after the story that got him blackballed from the industry.

He decides to take the drive to the Archivist. The files document not just blackmailing of subjects, but conditioning. Processes like ‘reinforce humiliation’, ‘preserve asset pliability’, ‘reverse dopamine reward mechanism’. The prototype ‘asset’? Juno Skye. Classified as ‘dormant but viable’. Now, as they look at the drive, someone is looking back. The choir. Who, or what, is the Vale Group?

Various players in the game give Caleb cryptic clues, sometimes so cryptic as to be annoying. He has to solve them in time to save Juno. We get pretty much all the way though the game without learning why this is happening. But the game seems to be poking cynically at the PR world, AI gone mad, a conspiracy turning assets’ lives and emotions into commodities that can be fed to the public, and even to themselves, in monetised bytes, turning ‘raw feed’ into ‘deepfake narrative’.

Caleb and Juno save the day by using computer wizardry. I wish I’d understood it. It looked cool.

The writing is stylish yet to the point, with a noirish tone, well-structured and well-paced. If you know computers you’ll understand the technospeak better than I did; it sounded good. It’s hard to write a techno-thriller when much of the plot takes place in MS Dos, but (despite my not understanding the code) I thought it managed this.

I chose this book having liked Sanchez’ It Ends with Him, a more psychological, inspirational work. This one tells more of a story.