Double-blind

Item Detail

1. Overview
2. Online Book Review

• Overview

  It’s the 1970s, the final icy winter of the Cold War. American psychiatrist Josh Bozeman finds himself in St. John’s as part of covert research group SHIP, the Society for Human Improvement and Potential. But SHIP defines "improvement" and "potential" as anything that can be forged into a weapon.

  Enter Christy Monroe, one of Bozeman’s favourite patients, a nine-year-old girl with an extraordinary psychic gift. She becomes Bozeman’s subject in a SHIP double-blind experiment where the whole reality is dangerously obscure, blurring the lines between patient and doctor, duty and conscience, sanity and madness.

  
  Twenty-five years later, Bozeman is drawn into an even darker paranormal agenda that sends him back to Newfoundland as the principal player in an endgame that could have mortal consequences for Christy, or for his own soul.

   
  Double-blind is a feverish story of complicity, empathy, and the extremities of duty and love.

• Online Book Review

  Hallett's own weapons are subtly deployed in this convincing human drama. Her characters are thorough and striking, and her book is replete with aspects of horror, mystery, and hospital thriller, while transcending the conventions of mere genre. The descriptions of medical procedures are impressive in their detail, but the book avoids "going textbook" on the reader. In fact, Hallett's voice often surprisingly, pleasantly veers to the poetic.
  

  -Gary Butler, Quill and Quire
  
  

  Michelle Butler Hallett's first novel, Double-blind is a strong follow-up to her very promising short story collection, The Shadow Side of Grace.
  
  Butler Hallett doesn't write the equivalent of comfort food, anyway - she's too quirky, avid and keyed up for that.
  
  

  -Joan Sullivan, The Telegram