Dead Connection

Dead Connection
Alafair Burke
Henry Holt
ISBN: 0-8050-7785-5
Fiction, Crime Fiction
Reviewed by Dave Thompson

Anyone who has ever ventured into the waters on online dating, and then leaped out again because the whole thing feels somehow creepy, will find their every suspicion borne out by Dead Connection. Nobody knows, after all, who or even what is lurking behind those so-sincere sounding pseudonyms that the Internet blithely hooks you up with; and, though not every one masks a murderous psycho or a sadistic stalker, the evening news brings up enough examples to make Dead Connection read like the front page of the paper.
Former deputy DA Burke paces her story as expertly as, one assumes, she once arranged her cases; there is no dead wood or empty space in the book, as Detective Ellie Hatcher is drawn from what initially seemed a straightforward case of multiple murders, linked to a popular online dating service, into a deeper, darker world that somehow connects with a savage interlude from her own past and the growing fear that the killer has already marked out his next victim, Ellie herself.
Set within the updated canyons and shadows of the same New York City that has hosted so many past masters of the crime thriller, Dead Connection is as intense as it is intriguing and you’ll never view a chatroom in the same way again.