Thomas Mullen is an author I’d never come across before, but his other books have gotten rave reviews. And this one had an intriguing premise: imagine a world where in the course of a few months, every human being is blinded. (That’s a lot easier to do now after the COVID pandemic.) The next step is a little bit less plausible: imagine that scientists come up with a way, using a device implanted in your head, to allow people to see again.

That’s implausible not because scientists can’t create amazing solutions, but because of the very possibility that such devices, connected to the net, could be manipulated. And that’s the heart of this imaginative science fiction / police procedural set in the near future.

A device that not only replaces your vision but “enhances” it by showing you the nearest restaurants, the local weather and so on is almost certainly going to be used for evil purposes. And it is.

I won’t give the main plot line away — suffice it to say that this is a well-crafted, gripping novel with characters that have some genuine depth. The author has taken a sci-fi premise and run with it, imagining all the issues that would come up in such a world. A world, by the way, that I would never want to live in.