The Dead Reckoner Volume One: Absolution and Desolation

The dead reckoner is a computer known as the Sorter, which at first appears as nothing more than a personality test that can predict human behavior with exquisite accuracy. To the police, it sorts criminals into those who will offend again and those who will not. To wall street, it sorts social trends into those that will upset the markets and those that will pass unnoticed. To an individual, it sorts choices into those that will lead to love, success and satisfaction - and those that will cause us irrevocable harm.

This is the story of Ruth Holland, a Boston police detective with ties to the Sorter that she doesn’t yet understand. It is the story of Kevin Nagel, a theorist who devises the Sorter but can’t bring it into reality. And it is the story of Reginald Binder, a master salesman who gives the Sorter life and becomes the technology’s most zealous prophet. To Binder, human free will is a fantasy. We follow our programming and all our sorrows stem from the origin of that programming: aimless natural selection. Binder wants more than a personality test, he wants nothing less than a computer that can reprogram the human race and usher us into our utopian future.

Eager to realize his ambitions, Binder stages a show of the Sorter’s power. However, he has unwittingly given the machine a mind of his own. The Sorter initiates an experiment, pitting its subjects against each other. An accidental victim of this experiment is Ruth Holland’s son. Now Ruth must discover the Sorter’s plan, along the way uncovering her own link to the Sorter’s very creation, and to the mysterious person who is the true dead reckoner, the one who set every event into motion.