Death Match

Lincoln Child

Christopher Lash is a psychologist who had been a profiler for the FBI. He left them a few years earlier and now has his own practice. He is contacted by Eden, the exclusive high tech matchmaking company. One of their perfect couples, a super couple, has inexplicitly commited double suicide. Eden had found the Thorpes to be a 100% match, extremely rare among their thousands of well matched, happy couples.

Eden prides itself on its unique matching softward. Richard Silver is the reclusive inventer of Liza, the supercomputer that does all the computing to bring the couples together. Edwin Mauchly is Silver's right hand man, the man in charge of Eden, it's business, and it's security. When the Thorpes are discovered, Mauchly contacts Lash for assistance. He wants Lash to figure out what happened to the Thorpes. They appeared to be a perfect couple. What went wrong?

A basic profiling of the couple reveals no indicators as to a reason for the couple to commit suicide in front of their young daughter. Lash has to learn deep proprietary secrets of Eden to investigate the couple and the problem. When another super couple commits double suicide, Lash is sure the cause is murder, not suicide. But who? And how? Can Lash figure out the murderer before the murderer adds him to the list?

It wasn't long before I was totally engrossed in Death Match. (I read this and Dean Koontz' The Husband in the same week. It was a chilly week.) It gripped me the same way Child's other independent novel, Utopia, did. I also like Child's work with Douglas Preston.

Eden, Christopher Lash and Richard Silver come to life in this novel. I can almost picture the Eden complex. I chuckled every time an Eden employee refered to all other electronic and online dating services as low-tech. If a person couldn't meet Eden's standards he or she usually would go to a less expensive low-tech competitor.

Death Match takes old themes and makes them new again. Dating services have been around in one form or another since the beginning of mankind (God was the matchmaker for Adam and Eve). Reclusive super geniuses give a lot of fodder for novel characters. Super computers are common in today's novels. Criminal profiling is an exploding business. Lincoln Child has brought all these elements together in a nerve wracking tale. You won't be sorry when you pick up this novel. And if you're currently a member of a dating service, you may want to rethink that...

Notice: Graphic violence

Utopia by Lincoln Child