Blind Spots

Seven years before the opening of this excellent near-future mystery from Mullen (Midnight Atlanta), life changed irrevocably when a catastrophic event, the Blinding, led to global human blindness. Technology has been developed to give people vision: small metal discs called vidders have been implanted on almost everyone, sending visual data to their brains. But that life-saving and sanity-saving workaround comes under threat. Homicide detective Mark Owens, who works in an unnamed American city, lands a case in which the killer, who fatally shot scientist Ray Jensen, was apparently invisible to the vidder of the colleague who was with Jensen at the time. That suggests that someone may have found a way to hack vidders, a development with frightening implications. Owens investigates, suspecting that Jensen’s murder connects to his research on enhancing vidders so that the cerebral cortex could better process the information they provide. Mullen makes his imagined future plausible by sweating the details. For example, after the Blinding, strangulation murders dominated, because the killers could be sure of the result. Fans of P.D. James’s Children of Men will be enthralled. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Apr.)