Perception - Lianne Downey

Of course we're not alone. So what are they waiting for? A speculative suspense novel that may change the way you view your life on Earth.

"...there are enough twists, cliffhanger chapter endings, and rich details about the Dutch Reformed community to set this gripping book apart from similar SF novels. An engaging tale with plenty of genre intrigue to satisfy SF fans."-Kirkus Reviews

Minda Blake has kept the government's UAP secrets for too long. Now it's killing her. For years she used her psychic skills as a remote viewer to help Blackthorn, a government black ops contractor, to recover and conceal extraterrestrial debris after UFO sightings around the world. But she can't do it anymore. Her conscience won't allow it.

Her doctor says she's suffering from a new kind of PTSD that affects drone assassination pilots who violate their sense of "what's right" day after day. Suicide is their common end and she's already contemplated it. So tonight, high on the dunes over Lake Michigan, that will stop. She will launch her scheme to reveal the truth to the world!

Everything goes according to her plan-until it doesn't. Now she's on the run.

While a blizzard rages across West Michigan, she's thrown together with a total stranger, Garritt Vanderhoeven, an outcast from the area's conservative Dutch Reformed community who is haunted by his own psychic demons. Together they search for a missing teenager whose life is in danger and a stolen artifact that imperils the world at large. What they uncover is so much...staggeringly much...more. And time is running out.

With a makeshift team that includes a mysterious mentor, a persistent farm girl, a vagabond restaurant hostess, and a posse of friends and family willing to cross cultural taboos for the right cause, they discover that their nemeses aren't at all what's expected. New age religion factors in, and interdimensional barriers are broken with unpredictable results. As the story twists into uncharted challenges, they'll all need to bring their most profound skills to the forefront-including those society rejects.

Fans of Gene Roddenberry will appreciate this shockingly hopeful leap into the unknown reaches of human perception.

From the jacket flap:

Minda Blake was toiling away for Naval Intelligence when someone discovered what her mind had been able to do since childhood. Next she knew she was honorably discharged and swept into the maelstrom of Blackthorn, a black ops military-style contractor working for the U.S. government. She had no idea what she'd be tasked to do after her extensive training to become a remote viewer.

Like everyone else, she'd heard about the U.S. government's experiments with psychic-or what they called "psi"-operatives, fueled by its desire to keep up with Russian and Chinese research into advanced human mental capacities. Could a remote viewer locate military targets using their mind alone? It was a top-secret endeavor, highly controversial among the armed forces. Code named Stargate by some branches.

But that whole operation was shut down in the mid-1990s, wasn't it? After former President Jimmy Carter let it leak in an interview that a "psychic spy" had helped them locate a downed Russian spy plane? The media had a field day ridiculing and mocking the program. Top brass denied any participation, and the files and research disappeared under a cloud of humiliation and scandal. The fired remote viewers drifted off to write books or teach classes in the "paranormal." A mocking movie was made, a documentary followed, but psi research by the government ended abruptly.

Or did it?