Tag: Government Cover Up

B. Lorenzo Buckinchere

Mar 29, 2026

It is the end of the month, and time once again for our monthly review series. The month of March features a review of Perception by Lianne Downey, but before we begin, here is a disclaimer.

Disclaimer:

The following review contains spoilers, so I recommend supporting the official release before reading this, or any other review on the novel.

Now without further ado, let’s get into it.

Overview:

Perception is a 2024 American novel by Lianne Downey, the first in her psychics and aliens series. The story follows Minda Blake, a young psychic remote viewer who is contracted by “Blackthorne,” a private government contractor, and offshoot of the U.S. navy tasked with locating debris from alien space crafts before they are able to get into the wrong hands, and become public knowledge.

Minda, affectionately called Min throughout the novel, is very content with her job at Blackthorne. She shares a San Diego apartment with Amrita, one of her co-workers at Blackthorne, and her job is satisfying for the most part. That is until the secrets she is obligated to keep by contract starts weighing on her health.

Plot (spoilers):

While out searching for the fragment of an alien spacecraft in the desert one night, Minda suffers a head injury when Wade, one of her co-workers pushes her off a sand dune. Enroute to the hospital, Minda has a dream, more like a premonition of Gramma Julene, her deceased grandmother, who is happily in the company of one Reverend Ben. This is the first of several premonitions that Minda has of Ben throughout the novel.

Minda is now on sick leave from work, resting in the Michigan town of Veenlanden. While having lunch at a diner one day, one of the waitresses named Agnes tells Minda about the heroism of Garritt Vanderhoeven, their ace chef who survived a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest, and rescued dozens of passengers, mostly Ecuadorians from certain death.

Garritt is from a conservative Dutch background, and is battling the demons of his flawed upbringing. At the job, he is very close with Juan, his Mexican teenage co-worker who will soon find himself at the center of a massive controversy.

While recovering in Michigan, Minda begins to feel the guilt of her obligations. She soon starts questioning the ethics of keeping the existence of aliens from the public, and decides to betray Blackthorne and go public with the space debris she found in the desert. But before Minda could expose Blackthorne’s secret, Juan is arrested by the police.

Not long after Juan’s arrest, Luciana, Juan’s pregnant girlfriend shows up at the diner, looking for him. When they tell her that Juan is in jail, Luciana says that she already checked, and he’s not there. If the police don’t have Juan, who does?

Minda speculates that Juan may have the missing space debris, and that the officers who arrested Juan were actually undercover Blackthorne operatives tracking the whereabouts of the fragment. Luciana seems to think that Juan may be with Bobby Lee, a local new-age cult leader and conspiracy theorist.

And so, as a blizzard threatens to plummet them into oblivion, Minda convinces Garritt to drive her in search of Bobby Lee. Minda and Garritt spots Bobby Lee in the storm, but as soon as Bobby Lee sees Minda sitting inside Garritt’s truck, he warns Garritt to stay away from her, and then he disappears.

As the blizzard rages on, Garritt and Minda are forced to seek shelter at Garritt’s house. While there, Minda has a premonition of Wade’s body lying face down in the snow, and it is not immediately clear to her as to whether or not Wade is alive or dead, or if this is an event that’s yet to occur.

She is also forced to confess to Garritt, who she is, and where she works. After all, if she wants him to help her, she is going to have to trust him somewhat.

She also tells him that she plans on exposing their discovery in the desert because the public has a right to know, but also that the space fragment is missing, and that if Juan doesn’t have it, then he probably gave it to Bobby Lee.

Not only that, but if the officers who arrested Juan were truly undercover Blackthorne operatives, then Blackthorne must also realize by now that the fragment is missing.

She says that they have to go back out into the blizzard to continue their search for Juan and Bobby Lee, and he obviously thinks she’s crazy at this point, but he agrees to go with her anyway.

While they are driving through the blizzard, a military chopper lands in the middle of the storm and captures Minda, separating her from Garritt who narrowly escapes, and it seems like their cause is a lost one.

Garritt, despite suffering an injured leg was able to track down Bobby Lee’s church, housed inside the back of a diner, and decides to go there.

Bobby Lee hands Garritt an address, about an hour drive outside of town, and Garritt suspects that that’s where they must be holding Juan, but Bobby Lee doesn’t really say much more than that.

Garritt decides to drive an hour in the middle of a blizzard with an injured leg to the address that Bobby Lee gave him, based mostly on a hunch, and arrives at an old abandoned house with all the lights out. With one good leg, he is able to break inside the house to save himself from hypothermia.

Juan is not there, but Garritt notices a cage where he suspects they must have held Juan. He suspects that they must have moved Juan to another location after the heater broke, and it became too cold inside the house.

Despite all of that, Garritt soon falls asleep on an old couch where he has a dream that would explain his undying loyalty to Juan. Then he is suddenly awakened by the sound of someone entering the abandoned house.

As the unforgiving blizzard rages on, Agnes begins to worry about Garritt’s whereabouts as she sees it is getting late. She is able to find out where he is by tracking his phone.

She gets a bad feeling about all this, and calls Sam, another of their co-workers. The two girls formulate a rescue plan that involves jacking her brother’s truck while he sleeps.

They arrive at the abandoned house just in time to see a group of men taking Garritt away with his head covered. Agnes and Sam trails them in her brother’s stolen truck to the location of another house, and starts calling everyone she knows, telling them to call their friends.

Meanwhile inside that house, Garritt finds Juan alive. They are being held together inside the basement. Garritt is soon taken upstairs only to see that the house is actually a luxurious mansion. Garritt is further shocked to discover that the house is owned by Senator Volkort Vanderhoeven, his estranged father.

The senator explains to his son that his intention was to save Juan, but the plan went awry. He knows about the missing space fragment, and believes that humanity should come together to protect themselves from an alien invasion, much to Garritt’s surprise, who is shocked to hear his Dutch conservative christian father talk about believing in aliens.

Sam and Agnes soon arrive at the senator’s doorstep with a whole posse of their own as well as Juan’s loved ones, and also the news media in tow, and Juan is safely rescued.

Garritt chooses to stay behind after they are all gone, and is utterly disgusted when he discovers a scandalous little secret about his father that further invalidates his flawed upbringing.

Meanwhile in San Diego, Minda comes face to face with Reverend Ben from her dreams. It turns out that not only is he actually real, but also a client of Blackthorne’s. They have a heart-to-heart that changes Minda’s perspectives, and gives her a renewed sense of purpose.

Once she is back in Michigan, she uses her psychic powers along with the help of Juan, who turned out to be psychic after all, to remotely track the fragment back to Bobby Lee.

Haunted by the demons of his own flawed upbringing, Bobby Lee is now flying a private plane in inclement weather to take the fragment to sell to the highest bidder. Sleep deprived, he begins to hallucinate, and soon crashes into the Colorado Rockies, where he is presumed dead.

Minda and Juan become compromised from being in Bobby Lee’s messed-up head. Garritt and Agnes, worried they may either die or go insane, call Blackthorne for help. They soon arrive on the scene and take them to a state of the art atrium, where they recover inside a botanical greenhouse.

When Minda and Juan recover, they are briefed of Bobby Lee’s plane crash. It turns out that the rose-shaped atrium in which they have found themselves is really a training campus for many ethnicities around the world who are preparing to become intergalactic peace ambassadors at some point.

For their courage and loyalty, Minda, Juan, Garritt, and Agnes are invited to train at the atrium, but are warned that they would have to keep the secret of their daily whereabouts from their loved ones while they are in training, until the world is ready for the aliens to reveal themselves.

While there, they are introduced to the ambassadors of an alien race called the Oraylians. As Garritt bonds with one of the Oraylian women, it begins to seem highly probable that he…

Something for the readers to ponder on for the sequel.

Review:

The world building is totally on point with this one. The narrative had gotten off to a slow start that felt like chicken scratch to my ADHD brain. But as you go along, you begin to discover that this novel is ADHD-friendly after all, with Downey dropping pointers along the way from the perspective of each character. Then the plot slowly builds to a crescendo that makes it all the more worth it in the end (or long before).

I see a lot of myself in Garritt despite our difference in socio-economic backgrounds, particularly as it relates to choosing a path that may seem wayward in comparison to the lot of one’s birth, which makes him the most relatable character to me.

I also doubt we’ve seen the last of the senator, and I anticipate a lot more character developments, and world building in the sequel as the clash of ideologies promise to come to a head.

Finally, this work of fiction gives you the feel that psychics and aliens are real. Not in an immersive way that pulls you into their world, but in a way that suggests that they are already a part of ours. It provokes speculation into what’s really possible, and inspires exploration into the unknown.

I give this one a four out of five roast beef sandwiches, and I’ll see you on the next one.

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