The Blinds: An Eerie Tale in a Bizarre Setting

$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.