Book Review: The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney

´Tim was obsessed by the idea that AI interactions should be lifelike´.

I will always be a geek by heart therefore, when I am not reading, I may be for sure busy trying to figure out some cyber-related riddles. Sometimes my brain is also busy with maths, my lifelong passion, I rarely talk about. Thus, finding novels - particularly crime novels - resonating with my particular interests is a pleasant event, for which I prepare accordingly, ready to dedicate an important amount of time to enjoy the moment.

The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney sounded like my kind of reading challenge. Set in the world of start-ups, featuring a courageous entrepreneur, that was so much in love with his late wife, that he created a robot version of her - with feelings, minus eating, drinking, sexual contact. Thus, a bit of love story as well. But as the layers of an onion, once the story advances, things prove to be completely different as they were assumed to: the wife that disappeared may have been in fact killed by Tim himself, who is himself a sociopath mysoginist. His wife may have set up her own death, trying to escape the abusive marriage as well as probably the recent autism diagnosis of their son, Danny. And the robot herself may develop an attachment to Tim, but also is trying to find out what happened to her human correspondent. 

The mystery and crime novel is eventful, with twists without end until the story finishes. The story is told on multiple voices, which adds more diverse points of view, therefore, the expectation of different red threads, although not all of them are going somewhere. Also, the portrayal of autism is very empathic and scientifically and pedagogically relatable.

My biggest - geekish - shortcoming has to do with the robot herself. The limits of her thinking and the ways in which memories - initially, gathered from social media interactions - are built, how far in the past and most importantly, its neuronal connections, especially those allowing to create human-like attachments. Without this understanding, the whole conundrum of the robot herself is completelly missing the point and therefore it downgrades the geek/robot story itself.

The Perfect Wife started on a good premise for me, but in the end did not answered many of my specific questions therefore soon after, my excitement turned in sheer irritation as it could not answer questions important for the overall understanding of the story.

Rating: 2.5 stars