Blind Spots

November 1, 2022

After a virus blinds the world's entire population, people must rely on a new technology that mimics vision, downloading visual data directly to their brains. But someone is tampering with the technology, blacking out a killer's actions from witnesses' "sight." It's happened to homicide detective Mark Owens, and now his investigations hinge on the invisible. Mullen's Lightning Men was short-listed for a CWA Dagger Award; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2023
In the high-tech future, murder is murky. Seven years after a cataclysmic global event known as The Blinding, people are able to see only with the aid of vidders, metal discs implanted in their temples. Vidders have helped restore societal order, but organized crime is still a huge challenge for law enforcement. Partners Mark Owens and Safiya Khouri, along with the abrasive man-mountain Peterson, a third cop, find themselves in the run-down River District, where a tense situation and a malfunctioning vidder lead to a questionable shooting by Owens. He's dressed down by crusty Capt. Carlyle, who runs the Major Crimes unit. On the homefront, Owens' lover, Amira Quigley, who's also a fellow cop, wants to move in with him. Stress and the specter of his ex Jeanie, a painter whose artwork still adorns the walls of Owens' apartment, make him waffle. All the while, a Truth Commission instituted by the new president is laying out complex procedures and investigating recent activities of government employees, including Owens. The opening chapters are heavy with exposition, but Mullen's crisp character delineation pays off as the plot unfolds. He rights the narrative ship with a complex puzzle: the murder of Dr. Jensen, a researcher at Bio-Lux Technologies, by a blurry figure much like one Owens encountered on the waterfront. More murders follow. Grounded in the set pieces of police procedurals, this is both a whodunit and a cautionary tale about technology and government authoritarianism run amok. A lively, offbeat mystery with a thought-provoking premise.

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Starred review from February 27, 2023
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.

Starred review from February 15, 2023
It's been seven years since a highly contagious virus (or possibly a bioweapon), which came to be known as the Blinding, swept around the world and, over a period of months, took away humanity's sight. It was a catastrophic event, and even now the world is struggling to recover, to return to some sort of normality. The ""vidders""--machines that pull in an array of virtual stimuli and then feed all of it directly to the wearer's brain--help. Sight, or something like it, has returned, but only to those who can afford a vidder. Mark Owens is a homicide detective; an old-school cop, who served on the force before the Blinding, he's having difficulties with his latest case, which involves a murder committed by someone who, according to a surviving witness, was entirely invisible to her vidder--just a black, featureless form. The tech experts say it's not possible, but Owens prefers to find his own answers, and what he finds could send the world plummeting back into chaos. The author of The Last Town on Earth (2006) and Darktown (2016) has outdone himself here: this is a tremendous crime-SF hybrid, a brilliantly conceived story impeccably told. A novel that will stay with you for a very long time.

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