Blue Labyrinth by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

 I know I've read several of the Agent Pendergast series by Preston and Child before, including Still Life with Crows and Relic, but for some reason I never put together the idea that they were a series. As expected, this one was twisty and a bit dark, with a truly quirky and unique protagonist.

I think I need to drop back and read a couple books prior to this one to understand what's really going on, because there are a number of cryptic references to earlier events, but the crux of the matter is that one of Pendergast's recently-discovered twin sons, the "evil" twin, who was a serial killer in New York in an earlier story, turns up murdered on the agent's front porch one day, after a long exile in the jungles of Brazil. The agent is never one to leave a good mystery alone, and so he embarks on his own quest to find out who has killed his son, whom he despises, and why the crime was committed.

In parallel, one of Pendergast's old friends, detective d'Agosta, is involved with his own murder mystery, involving the bludgeoning death in an isolated corner of a museum, of one of the technicians who works in the department which handles old skeletons...skeletons in the closet indeed!

This one gets violent, bloody and twisty pretty quickly. I definitely have to drop back and read some of the earlier books so I get some of the major characters' back stories. Preston & Child are always good.

Gideon's Sword by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Preston and Child generally write some pretty good fiction together. Gideon's Sword is the story of Gideon Crew, whose father was gunned down by federal agents when he was 12, and he doesn't learn until he is an adult and his mother is dying, that his father was one of the good guys, killed by a general named Tucker who feared he would disclose a secret that would take down Tucker and his friends. Gideon spent time as an art thief as a young man, and uses his technical expertise on security systems, plus a good dose of social engineering, throughout the story.

It turns out that Gideon's quest to destroy Tucker for killing his father doesn't take very long, in terms of the novel, and then he is recruited by a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security to do some work for them. He's halfway blackmailed into doing the work, as the contractor seems to know all about Gideon's past, and then discouraged from turning the job down to follow his own long term plans when they tell him that he only has a short time to live, with an inoperable aneurysm in his brain that could explode any time.

His mission is to intercept a Chinese defector, Mark Wu, at the airport in New York and to obtain certain information Wu is suspected to be bringing into the country about a "super weapon" the Chinese have been developing. I began to wonder at this point why in the world a secretive contractor for DHS would want to use an untried untested new hire to do the job, and continued to wonder it all the way to the denouement, when the head of the company discloses that all of their computer simulations showed that any other option would result in failure, while using Crew - an unpredictable rogue - had a strong probability of success.

This story has a very twisty plot, with a lot of creative details, but there were just too many unbelievable bits for me. Crew's social engineering skills always seemed up to the task at hand, and I had a hard time believing that so many people would believe his lies, especially when he used them on naturally suspicious people like police and TSA agents. It was a quick read, but I didn't feel it was Preston & Child's best work.

Death Match by Lincoln Child

An old literary friend of mine recommended Lincoln Child as a good thriller writer a while back, and I just happened to pick up his Death Match at the library yesterday. This one's definitely a page-turner. The premise is fairly simple; a company has finally perfected a matchmaking service, using a supercomputer, that will find people's soulmates. Using some pretty thorough physical and psychological testing, it is able to match people very successfully. Evidently, even happily married couples only achieve a 35% match on the compatibility index, and this revolutionary process can achieve matches in the 90% plus range.


And, every so often, the computer produces what the company, Eden, Inc., refers to as a "supercouple," a couple whose indices match 100%. In the two years or so the company has been providing its services, there have been six such couples produced. And now, for the fly in the ointment... One of these supercouples, to all outward appearances deliriously happy, has just committed double suicide.
So, Eden hires an outside consultant, psychologist and former FBI profiler, Christopher Lash, to investigate the deaths and find out how this could happen to a perfect couple. Shortly after he begins his investigation, generating little but dead ends and false starts, a second "supercouple" also commits suicide.

The plot takes a number of good twists, and really keeps you guessing. When you finally get to the point you figure out the inescapable conclusion, it's like a good forehead slap. I can't really get into it, as I really wouldn't want to spoil the surprise for you. On the characterization side, it's a little weak. Most of the characters remain one-dimensional throughout, except for our intrepid investigator, whom we gradually come to understand pretty thoroughly.