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| $9.99 eBook Version |
From the Edgar Award-nominated author Adam Sternbergh, a
blistering thriller of violence and deception, aching heartbreak, and dark
betrayals.
Imagine a small town populated by criminals—people plucked
from their lives, with their memories altered, who’ve been granted new
identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural
Texas populated by misfits who don’t know if they’ve perpetrated a crime or
just witnessed one. What’s clear to them is that if they leave, they will end
up dead.
For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy
peace—but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town’s
residents revolt. Cooper has his own secrets to protect, so when his new deputy
starts digging, he needs to keep one step ahead of her—and the mysterious
outsiders who threaten to tear the whole place down. The more he learns, the
more the hard truth is revealed: The Blinds is no sleepy hideaway. It’s
simmering with violence and deception, aching heartbreak and dark betrayals.
Adam Sternbergh’s novel has an unusual setting, a community
where 50 criminals live in cinder-block bungalows surrounded by a 14-foot fence
on the arid plains of West Texas. The residents call their grim little world
the Blinds, perhaps because they are completely shielded from the outside world. They are given
books, booze, and meals but denied telephones, mail,
and visitors.
The Blinds unfolds as a unique experiment in rehabilitation
where all the criminal memories of the inhabitants of the town have been
erased. They know they’ve committed crimes, but they don’t know the details. Although
free to leave, they stay because they fear that the law, or perhaps old
enemies, might await them outside the fence. Life might not be perfect in the
Blinds, but it’s safe.
The story begins with the suicide of a resident named Errol
Colfax who kills himself with a gun he wasn’t supposed to have. Next, resident Hubert
Humphrey Gable is shot to death in the Blinds’ grubby little bar. The town sheriff,
Calvin Cooper, investigates the outburst of violence, but without success. While
a likable sort, like the other inhabitants of the town, the sheriff also has
his secrets.
The violence escalates. Suspicious of one man, the sheriff
confronts him with his criminal record — “A litany of unimaginable perversion”
— only to have the man, who has no memory of his crimes, insist he is not
involved in the violence that has broken out. Unconvinced, the sheriff shoots him
dead.
There are a host of other
supporting characters in the story — Fran Adams is one of the few women in the
Blinds, and the mother of its only child, the sheriff's deputy, a woman who was
a battered wife before she took refuge in the Blinds, and Dr. Judy Holliday,
the scientist who dreamed up the experiment in rehabilitation. Another
resident, cruelly abused by his father as a child, responds at age 15 by
murdering his father and then his mother, setting him on course for a long
career as a professional killer. Each of the characters contributes to the growing mystery as the tale unfolds.
A famous California billionaire, poised to run for
president, sends armed killers to the Blinds to eliminate former associates who
know too much, turning the once-placid community’s dusty streets into a slaughterhouse.
The Blinds is a bizarre little town in Texas, the residents
a collection of
deplorables. But Sternbergh's
eerie thriller – a meditation on the ubiquity of evil of sorts, is supremely original
and endlessly fascinating. It is available in hardcover at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The electronic version is available from Google Play Books,
Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Amazon.
