DOUBLE BLIND

No-longer-blind music therapist Kendra Michaels, who’s already survived 26 attempts on her life (Look Behind You, 2017, etc.) while consulting with the FBI, gets an offer she can’t refuse about a new case.

Connecticut paralegal Elena Meyer was run down as she sprinted across San Diego’s Fifth Street, but she’d already been fatally shot. Why would Kendra be interested in the murder of a visitor she’d never met? Because Elena was carrying an envelope addressed to Kendra containing a memory stick with a video of a wedding. Given Kendra’s razor-sharp senses and keen logical prowess, it’s child’s play for her to establish that the wedding was that of Elizabeth and Jeffery Gelson. But it takes quite a while to figure out why Elena would have found it so urgent to share the video, which seems as innocuous as most of its ilk. When Kendra’s frequent collaborator, freelance consultant Adam Lynch, takes her to visit Brock Limited, a hardball security firm Elena’s law practice had been defending in what everybody insists was a routine lawsuit, Josh Blake, the Brock VP who’s repeatedly tried to recruit Adam, shows a dramatically darker side. Meanwhile, Kendra has already survived her 27th murder attempt, this one by French bulldog and poisoned leash. Readers know from the beginning who killed Elena Meyer but not why her killer continues to target other members of the Gelson wedding party or why he leaves each succeeding corpse at the same spot from which he kidnaps his next victim (a creepy twist that’s never satisfactorily explained). Although Kendra tosses off on-the-spot deductions as briskly as Sherlock Holmes, the emphasis is less on mystery than on the cat-and-mouse game between Kendra and the FBI, on the one hand, and the dark forces of Brock Ltd., on the other.

The heroine’s miraculous powers, the seemingly unstoppable villains, the perfunctory interest in character, the punchy dialogue, and the highly efficient action sequences suggest more clearly than ever that what the Johansens have been doing throughout this series is writing superhero comics without the pictures.