I've been contemplating a project to read all the Hugo winners for Best Novel, so let's start with the first, the intense and incredible Demolished Man.

Business tycoon Ben Reich needs to eliminate his greatest rival, but telepathic police make it impossible to have murder on your mind. Reich's plan is bold but full of holes, and it's up to psychic detective Lincoln Powell to unravel his scheme and collect damning physical evidence. What follows is an inverse mystery, a tense thriller, and a clear masterpiece of science fiction. Some stuff, female characters for example, are outdated to offensive, but the typographic conventionals used to illustrate telepathy feel surprisingly modern. Bester sketches rather than fleshes out his setting, with my favorite part being the creepy beneficent/eugenic long-term plan of the telepath guild to replace baseline humans. Of course, this is more than just a dumb adventure story, and the climax and conclusion get hyper-Freudian. It's an outdated theory, but one handled with verve and style.