Double Blind: A Police Procedural by Libby Fischer Hellmann

 I was sent a copy of  Double Blind by publicist Wiley Saichek for review. It's the sixth in the Georgia Davis series by Libby Fischer Hellmann. This is a very contemporary thriller that includes the Covid epidemic.  Several people died after receiving the Covid vaccine.  It was the same batch of the vaccine, and the doctor who was responsible had vanished.  This is the case that is under investigation in Double Blind.

                                     

                                  

PI Georgia Davis apparently has had no call for her services since the pandemic began.  I find this odd.  If people are confining themselves to their homes to avoid catching Covid, they can't investigate anything for themselves.  So they would be even more likely to call on someone who routinely runs that risk for a living.

There is another viewpoint character named Eden in Double Blind who is an abused Mormon wife. I found discussion of verbally abusive Mormons online.  To be fair to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, they do have a policy against all forms of  abuse. Readers shouldn't consider Eden's husband a typical Mormon.  In fact, I would consider him a very poor example of a human being. 

One of the locations where this novel takes place is Nauvoo, Illinois.  As someone who studied Hebrew, I would like to point out that Nauvoo does not mean beautiful place in Hebrew.  That would be makom yafeh. It's mentioned in this book that Mormonism founder Joseph Smith gave Nauvoo its name.   I wasn't astonished that Joseph Smith was not an authority on Hebrew.

 Georgia had hospital scrubs because an ICU nurse had given them to her mother when she was in the hospital in order to prevent her from getting an infection.  This bothered me. It sounds only semi-plausible.  The ICU nurse would get in trouble for providing scrubs to a hospital patient because scrubs identify people as staff providing patient care.  There are ways to prevent patients from getting an infection without breaking hospital protocol. 

Even more unlikely was Georgia somehow stumbling on the office of a hospital supervisor whose help she needed.  In a large hospital like this one, accidentally finding the right supervisor is too much of a coincidence.  Supervisors aren't in public hospital directories either.  I don't think that supervisors are supposed to be readily accessible to anyone but authorized personnel. 

Since I largely read this book  at times when I wasn't busy, I had moments of plot or character confusion.  I had to page back in the novel or run searches on characters. Readers of this review need to know that  I didn't have a continuous reading experience.  I'm certain that this influenced the way I view the book.

I think that the way I read Double Blind caused me to feel that it was less dramatically intense than it might have been under other circumstances.  I urge readers to make their own decisions about this novel.