The Blinds

June 12, 2017
Guilt, memory, and redemption swirl through this inventive science-fiction-based thriller from Edgar-finalist Sternbergh (Shovel Ready). In Caesura, an isolated Texas town that’s part penal colony, part rehabilitation experiment, Sheriff Calvin Cooper keeps the peace in a community that mixes the most savage of criminals with the victims of horrible crimes. What allows the two groups to coexist is that all their memories have been selectively edited to erase their recollections of their respective crime experiences. The fragile calm shatters when first one, then two residents are shot dead in a place where guns don’t officially exist. As the wider world intrudes, Cooper must handle new arrivals, work with the shadowy institute that has supplied the research and technology for memory editing, and defend his town against cynical outside forces that could burst the bubble that defines Cooper’s world. It’s a clever premise, but the many contrivances that support the plot don’t hold up as the novel moves briskly toward its conclusion, whose twists are telegraphed a little too clearly to preserve the element of surprise. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary.

Starred review from June 1, 2017
A tense, broiling, 21st-century Western with a crafty premise and a gruesomely high body count.Imagine HBO's Westworld, only without androids and taking place far closer to our own era, and you basically have the setting of this bleak-yet-antic prairie-noir novel by Sternbergh (Near Enemy, 2015, etc.). Somewhere in the most isolated reaches of the Texas Panhandle is the tiny, hardscrabble town of Caesura ("rhymes with tempura"), the population of which consists entirely of transplanted criminals who have not only been given new identities, but have had the memories of whatever they did to be relocated totally erased. It's part of an experimental program in behavior modification, and the community's got some pretty peculiar rules, one being that the residents' new names are compounds of movie stars and U.S. vice presidents. Examples include Spiro Mitchum, Greta Fillmore, Buster Ford, and Hubert Gable, the last of whom is the second resident within a week to have been found shot dead. Gable was killed in an apparent bar fight while the first death was an apparent suicide. Because these are the first such deaths in the town's eight-year history, it's become a priority puzzler for sheriff Calvin Cooper (yep, another alias) and his deputies, one of whom, a bright young woman named Dawes, thinks she knows where to look for a connection. Meanwhile, the parched stillness of what many of its residents call the Blinds is soon shattered by more than just errant gunfire; black vans carrying people with suits, dark glasses, and firearms appear, and the new arrivals start asking questions of their own that may have something to do with Calvin's good friend Fran Adams and her young son, Isaac. Two things are clear: nobody in this story is who they're supposed to be, and their secrets carry a high cost. Every time the reader thinks this story's turning right, it takes a hard left. But it never wanders in circles, and it does move like a championship stock car toward a climax that, however shattering, implies there's more to come.

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March 15, 2017
Sternbergh moves away from the New York setting of his Edgar-nominated debut, Shovel Ready, and its sequel, taking us to a remote Texas town called the Blinds. Its citizens, who have either committed or witnessed terrible crimes, have had their memories altered, but a suicide and murder in their midst has everyone uneasy. What's more, the sheriff has secrets to protect, especially from his new deputy. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2017
Sternbergh's new stand-alone thriller doesn't feel much like his bravura Spademan novels. It's much smaller in its frame and much more focused in its story, but it does bear what has become this very talented novelist's signature: a knack for finding humanity and passion in otherwise flattened, soul-killing landscapes. Here that landscape is very different than the dystopian, postdirty bomb New York of the Spademan series. The Blinds is a dusty, one-horse Texas town far off the grid, sleepy on the surface but roiling underneath. The town is the creation of a mad scientist able to remove specific parts of an individual's memory. This technique replaces witness protection as a way of luring heinous criminals to testify against their bosses: their memories will be cleansed of the evil they have done, and they will be relocated to the Blinds, where they will spend the rest of their lives doing . . . well, nothing, but doing it without fear of reprisal. Until now. Two murders in the Blinds have Sheriff Calvin Cooper worried that the town's delicate balance is seriously out of plumb. Boy, is he rightin ways we don't see coming. Cleverly improvising on the chord changes common to classic westerns (especially High Noon) and evoking the locked-room horror of Jim Thompson's The Getaway, Sternbergh shows again why he is one of the most inventive thriller writers working today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)