Brandilyn Collins. Double Blind. Nashville TN: B and H, 2012. Print.

Double Blind is a curious thriller. It is marketed, as it should be, as a plot-driven suspense story like those of Danielle Steele. It even refers to Jason Bourne. However, its main plot element is straight out of science fiction—not outer space sci-fi, but high-tech sci-fi like Cory Doctorow. Like his Little Brother, it is even set in the San Francisco Bay area in the very near future.

Lisa Newberry has been battling depression since her husband died about a year ago. A tech startup called Cognoscenti has developed a microchip known as the Empowerment Chip that is implanted in the brain to cure depression. Lisa is looking for anything that will take her out of her melancholia, so she volunteers to be a beta tester for this procedure.

After some minimally invasive brain surgery, her chip kicks in. The depression is gone! It is a miracle for Lisa.

Then something weird happens. She starts remembering something that never happened to her. She replays in her mind over and over a murder that she commits. But it is not her memory. Indeed, she sees everything from the perspective of a tall man who strangles his girlfriend , hides the body in a zippered suitcase, drives to a body of water, and tosses the suitcase into the water.

It is as though the chip has planted the memory of someone else in her head.

With the help of a police sketch artist whom she hires, she is able to actually identify the victim. From the details of the house and the automobile in her memory, she identifies the man, too. He is Dr. Hilderbrand, the rich and powerful CEO of Cognoscenti.

Clearly, I do not want this review to be a spoiler, but Double Blind‘s plot is clever. There are numerous twists, and things are not as they seem. Frankly, it could make a decent film.

There are surprises right to the very end. Still, it is not too much to say that the first few chapters very effectively describe what it is like to be depressed. We understand why our protagonist would even consider such a procedure: anything to get rid of this hopelessness…

As I was talking about this book to another person who had read Double Blind, she thought it was a cautionary tale about the mark of the Beast from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Implanted chips could be used to keep track of financial transactions but also keep track of people. The name Cognoscenti does have Latin roots and similar meaning to—dare I say it—Illuminati. Beware and be wise. Enjoy the tale.