Whatever your troubles might be, they surely are trumped by George Shuman's fictional heroine Sherry Moore. Blind since childhood, Moore possesses the extraordinary ability to divine the last seconds of thought of murder victims and other unfortunates.
You would think this gift, affected by holding the hand of the dead person, would be trouble enough.
In "Second Sight," Shuman's fourth novel, the sightless, beguiling and beautiful Moore encounters the deepest, darkest secret in the frequently deep and dark history of the U.S. intelligence community -- a mind-control regime that took shape at the dawn of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Now that's trouble.
Shuman, who settled in Laughlintown, Westmoreland County, after a 20-year career with the Washington, D.C., police department, calls "Second Sight" "a novel of psychic suspense." He dedicates the novel in a most fact-based way "to the 8,176 Americans still missing in Korea and to soldiers and agents of every American war ever left behind on foreign soil."
Whether this was done to add an air of authenticity to the novel is not clear. What is clear is that the latest Sherry Moore installment is an entertaining adventure whose relationship to reality, we might hope and pray, is purely coincidental. Talk about "un-American activities." Here, Korean War soldiers volunteer to leave the front lines to participate, they are told, in a program vital to national security.
For doing their patriotic duty, they are eventually slain (to keep the program a secret). One, however, survives after first trying to kill himself. He spends the next six decades in a coma in an upstate New York insane asylum. Following his death, the man's hand is clasped by Sherry Moore, who knows the innocent Philadelphia doctor into whose care the body had been delivered.
The novel's cast of characters includes a Nobel Prize-winning scientist -- a demented, wheelchair-bound man of thought (echoes of Dr. Strangelove) whose mind-control formula was concocted for keeping at bay the dictators who would harm the United States. In other words, he did it for the greater good.
The scientist's stepson struts across the pages. A smooth-talking, handsome young dude, he is unaccountably one of the few people with access to the mind-control secret. Being male (young, handsome and smooth-talking are irrelevant in this case), he uses the secret to get women to do his bidding. Predictably, debaucheries ensue.
"Second Sight" has its clunky moments. It's not at all certain that in 1950 people talked about the NFL in quite the terms Shuman uses. There is a conference that takes place toward the end of the novel that consists of unnamed former presidents of the United States, secretaries of state and defense and others in the hierarchy of leadership, including Sherry Moore's closest friend, a retired Navy admiral, who assumes the leading role among these much brighter luminaries.
It seems not even the former presidents knew very much about the mind-control efforts of the government they once headed.
"Second Sight" ponies up to the bar of fiction as a good summertime read. Have a good time with it. Just don't take it as fact.
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