Review: Death Match

Lincoln Child, Death Match (Anchor 2006)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39027.Death_Match?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8OLbjb50nY&rank=1

6 stars. A technothriller with a twisty solution to the crime

Maureen Bowman hears the Thorpe baby crying. Both Lewis’s and Lindsay’s cars are in the drive. Finally, she goes over. Following the child’s line of sight, she sees the trauma.

Christopher Lash steps out of a cab on Madison Avenue. Eden Incorporated offers its clients an AI-selected ‘perfect soulmate’ selected by ‘Liza’, a supercomputer built by Dr. Richard Silver. Eden is hiring Lash, a psychologist specialising in human relationships, to investigate the Thorpe double suicide. Lewis and Lindsay had been one of their ‘supercouples’, couples whose particulars had matched 100%.

Posing as an investigator for the couple’s insurance policies, he interviews Lindsay’s father. ‘The happiest couple I’ve ever seen,’ he says.

Then, another supercouple commits double suicide. The wife survives long enough to say, ‘Make it stop. The sound in my head.’ These comprise what the FBI calls ‘equivocal deaths’, deaths that are related but with the nature of the relation unknown.

Lash can only suggest the possibility of homicide, probably a rejected Eden candidate. James Groesch is flagged. Lash has been getting phone hang-ups, and his credit card is declined. Only once in his career has he seen a serial killer like this.

Eden head of research Tara has been matched with a colleague – Gary Handerling, who, when investigated, proves to have utilised Eaton information to target vulnerable women.

Reluctantly, Eden brings him ‘inside the wall’, allowing him access to client files. He tries the interview process as an applicant and is rejected. Lash, for some reason not removed from the Eden applicants database, is matched with a soulmate – Diana Mirrin, and they have a date. But the next supercouple on the list, the Connellys, are under threat.

The brilliant twisty solution to the crime relies both on Lash’s expertise as a psychologist and Eden’s computer wizardry. Despite computer processing and AI having dramatically moved on in 29 years since its 1994 publication, the techno-bits don’t seem antiquated and still surprise.