Matchmaking for Psychopaths Summary, Characters and Themes

Matchmaking for Psychopaths by Tasha Coryell is a darkly comic thriller that twists the familiar tropes of romantic comedy into something far more unsettling.  At its center is Lexie, a woman desperate for love and belonging, who works at a matchmaking service with an unusual specialty: pairing psychopaths.

Beneath her professional façade, however, lies a fractured past, a betrayal by her closest companions, and a legacy of violence she cannot escape.  The novel explores obsession, secrecy, and the lengths people will go to in order to find connection. It is as much a psychological exploration as it is a tale of betrayal, revenge, and survival.

Summary

Lexie grows up with an unusual childhood—while she attends school like any other child, her parents are secretly committing murders.  She learns to live with this double life until her parents’ arrest shatters everything.

Ostracized and bullied, she changes her name to escape the shadow of their crimes.  As an adult, she works at Better Love, a high-end matchmaking service with a covert mission of pairing psychopaths with suitable partners, using psychological tests to identify traits most people would overlook.

Outwardly, her life seems stable: she is engaged to Noah, a man who supported her through difficult times, and has a best friend in Molly, her closest confidante.  But her seemingly happy world collapses on her thirtieth birthday when Noah and Molly reveal they are in love with each other.

Shocked and devastated, Lexie lashes out at Molly, then drowns her sorrow in alcohol.  She ends up spending a reckless night with a stranger named Aidan, who quickly becomes entangled in her life.

At work, she struggles to maintain her composure, hiding her heartbreak from colleagues while throwing herself into her cases.  One client, Rebecca Newsom, captivates her.

Rebecca is glamorous, intelligent, and shares Lexie’s fascination with reality TV.  Their bond deepens when Lexie discovers Rebecca also lost a parent to murder.

The connection becomes personal, blurring the boundaries between professional matchmaking and friendship.  For Lexie, Rebecca begins to fill the void left by Molly’s betrayal.

Meanwhile, Lexie’s past begins resurfacing in threatening ways.  She receives ominous notes and roses with messages suggesting someone knows about her parents’ crimes.

She also begins to suspect Aidan, whose sudden reappearance as a Better Love client unnerves her.  He hints at knowing more about her than he should, and his presence rekindles fears about the secrets she drunkenly revealed during their first encounter.

At the same time, Noah disappears under mysterious circumstances.  Lexie obsesses over his absence, hoping he will return, until gruesome gifts begin arriving—severed body parts, including Noah’s heart.

One night, she finds a horrifying display in her own home: body parts arranged around miniature houses, confirming Noah has been murdered.  Wracked with grief and uncertainty, she even wonders if she herself might have killed him in a blackout state.

The violence escalates.  Paul, a client, drunkenly harasses her and is arrested.

Soon after, Better Love’s office is attacked: fake blood, mannequin limbs, and graffiti reading “MATCHMAKING FOR PSYCHOPATHS” cover the walls.  During a chaotic confrontation, her colleague Nicole is shot and killed, while Aidan finishes off another coworker, Ethan, staging the scene as a murder-suicide.

Amidst the destruction, Lexie and Aidan kiss and then escape together.  Their relationship turns romantic, bound by shared secrets and violence.

Aidan introduces her to a life of danger and excitement, and Lexie begins to believe he might be her true soulmate.

Together, Lexie and Aidan devise a plan to frame Molly for Noah’s murder.  Sneaking into Molly’s apartment, Lexie hides Noah’s body parts there and calls in a bomb threat, ensuring the police discover the evidence.

Molly is arrested, and Lexie feels liberated from her old friend’s betrayal.  With Better Love shut down, she decides to leave matchmaking behind and consider a career as a therapist.

She and Aidan dream of a future together, imagining a grand house, a family, and a shared life free from the burdens of her past.

Rebecca, who has grown closer to Lexie, continues to play an important role.  She becomes maid of honor for Lexie’s upcoming wedding to Aidan.

At the rehearsal dinner, Rebecca praises Lexie’s loyalty, but tension lingers.  On the wedding day, a white box with a pink ribbon arrives in Lexie’s suite.

Inside is Noah’s severed head.  Rebecca reveals the shocking truth: she is Lexie’s half-sister, abandoned years ago by their manipulative mother.

She confesses she killed Noah not out of jealousy, but as a gift to set Lexie free.  At first she admits she had intended to kill Lexie, but changed her mind.

Their mother, still imprisoned, knew of Rebecca all along.  Overcome with rage and betrayal, Lexie stabs Rebecca to death.

In a final act of loyalty and survival, Lexie and Aidan clean up the mess, replace her gown with a striking red dress, and go through with their wedding ceremony as planned.  At the reception, they present a façade of normalcy while secretly disposing of Rebecca’s body in a nearby lake.

Lexie reflects that she no longer needs Molly or Rebecca—she has Aidan.  She accepts herself not as a victim of her parents’ legacy, but as someone who has embraced it.

With Aidan by her side, a cat, and visions of a family, she believes she has found her perfect life.  The story closes with Lexie fully committed to her new identity as both lover and killer, certain she has finally achieved the happy ending she once sought in romantic comedies, though in a far darker form.

Characters

Lexie (Alexandra)

Lexie is the heart of Matchmaking for Psychopaths, a character whose life is defined by contradiction and duality.  She is a woman who carefully crafts an image of stability and success, working as a professional matchmaker at Better Love, while internally unraveling from betrayal, grief, and the burden of her family’s violent past.

Lexie embodies both fragility and resilience.  Her longing for love, shaped by the romantic comedies of her childhood, clashes with the brutality of her reality, where betrayal comes from those closest to her and love itself becomes tangled with manipulation and violence.

Her relationship with Noah and Molly exposes her desperate need for belonging, even as she clings to illusions that are long shattered.  Professionally, Lexie is ambitious and competitive, vying for leadership within Better Love while bending rules for clients who remind her of her own loneliness.

She carries the trauma of growing up as the daughter of murderers, hiding her identity, and reinventing herself, which fuels both her fear of exposure and her fascination with dangerous people.  By the end of the novel, Lexie’s journey turns chilling as she embraces the same darkness she once tried to escape, finding love not in purity but in shared violence with Aidan.

Noah

Noah begins as Lexie’s fiancé and the promise of the romantic life she longed for.  His betrayal with Molly is devastating precisely because he represented stability and normalcy for Lexie—someone who cared for her during vulnerable moments, like her injury, and built a shared vision of a future together.

Yet Noah is also portrayed as emotionally weak, unwilling to confront or repair the destruction his choices cause.  His absence after leaving Lexie is haunting, especially when he becomes the center of the mystery surrounding grisly body parts and eventual death.

Noah’s role is less about his own depth and more about what he symbolizes: the illusion of perfect love, the betrayal that shatters Lexie’s constructed identity, and the corpse that becomes a pawn in others’ manipulations.  His death cements his role as both victim and catalyst for Lexie’s transformation.

Molly

Molly represents betrayal in its most intimate form—the best friend who becomes the rival.  Her friendship with Lexie is rooted in shared insecurity and vulnerability, making her eventual affair with Noah all the more cutting.

Molly initially appears as a supportive, sister-like figure, someone Lexie trusted with her darkest secrets, but she reveals herself as opportunistic and self-serving.  Even after stealing Noah, Molly continues to haunt Lexie’s psyche, embodying the loss of both romantic and platonic love.

Later, when Lexie frames Molly for Noah’s murder, Molly becomes a scapegoat in Lexie’s quest for survival and reinvention.  Her downfall illustrates the dangerous blurring of friendship, rivalry, and vengeance in Lexie’s life.

Rebecca Newsom

Rebecca is one of the most complex figures in the novel, shifting from client to confidante, and eventually to a sinister familial revelation.  At first, she is charming, intelligent, and resistant to superficial relationships, drawing Lexie toward her as a replacement for Molly.

Their bond deepens through shared trauma, particularly as both are daughters of murdered parents.  Rebecca provides Lexie with comfort, companionship, and a sense of safety—until her true intentions unravel.

Her final revelation, as Lexie’s half-sister who killed Noah as a “gift,” exposes the twisted undercurrent of their relationship.  Rebecca embodies both sisterhood and threat, love and violence, blurring the lines between ally and enemy.

Her murder at Lexie’s hands becomes both a rejection of familial toxicity and an embrace of Lexie’s own darkness.

Aidan

Aidan represents danger wrapped in allure.  A private jet pilot with charm and charisma, he enters Lexie’s life first as a reckless one-night encounter and later as a client who insinuates himself deeper into her world.

Aidan is both seducer and mirror—he reflects Lexie’s darkest impulses while offering companionship that normalizes them.  His fascination with her secrets and willingness to manipulate situations to his advantage make him untrustworthy, yet he becomes Lexie’s partner in love and violence.

Unlike Noah, who symbolized stability, Aidan offers chaos and intensity, aligning perfectly with Lexie’s buried nature.  By the end, as her husband and co-conspirator, Aidan is the person who accepts her fully for who she is—a killer shaped by her past and freed from illusions of innocence.

Serena

Serena, the founder of Better Love, is both mentor and figurehead.  A woman who turned personal tragedy—discovering her son’s psychopathic traits—into a business model, she represents ambition, reinvention, and the commodification of human relationships.

For Lexie, Serena is both inspiration and obstacle: someone whose approval matters, but also someone to compete with for status and control.  Serena’s influence extends beyond professional life; she sets the stage for Lexie’s ambitions and indirectly nurtures the qualities—secrecy, competitiveness, adaptability—that push Lexie toward embracing her darker instincts.

Nicole

Nicole is Lexie’s rival at Better Love, a character who sharpens Lexie’s ambition through their silent competition for professional advancement.  While Nicole appears shallow and image-driven at first, her brutal end in the office shooting highlights the indiscriminate violence that pervades the novel’s world.

Nicole’s presence emphasizes the cutthroat environment Lexie inhabits, where colleagues are not allies but threats, and survival often comes at the expense of others.

Themes

Betrayal and Abandonment

In Matchmaking for Psychopaths, betrayal functions as the defining rupture of the protagonist’s world.  Lexie’s carefully constructed life collapses when Noah, her fiancé, and Molly, her closest friend, confess their love for each other.

This betrayal is not presented as a sudden event but as a profound dismantling of trust and intimacy that Lexie has invested her entire identity into.  Her desperation to cling to Noah despite his rejection demonstrates how abandonment destabilizes her very sense of self, pushing her into denial and self-destructive fantasies.

Betrayal here is not limited to romantic relationships—it also echoes the rejection she experienced from her mother and the stigma of her parents’ criminal past.  Lexie’s obsessive attempts to restore what has been lost illustrate the lingering hold betrayal has on her psyche, showing that it is less about losing love and more about being forced to confront her own replaceability.

The narrative positions betrayal as both a catalyst for collapse and as a mirror of her lifelong struggle with abandonment, creating a cycle that she cannot escape without reinventing herself in darker, more violent ways.

Family Legacy and Inherited Violence

The weight of family legacy overshadows every aspect of Lexie’s life.  Her parents’ history of murder defines not only her childhood but also her adult identity, despite her attempts to erase the past through a new name and career.

Even when she strives for normalcy, reminders of her lineage—anonymous threats, grisly gifts, and her mother’s manipulative phone calls—drag her back into a world of violence.  The revelation of Rebecca as her half-sister reinforces the inescapability of this legacy, showing that violence is not only inherited but replicated in familial bonds.

Lexie’s final acceptance of herself as a killer alongside Aidan suggests that she has surrendered to this inheritance rather than resisted it.  The theme underscores the tension between self-determination and predestination, questioning whether people can truly escape the bloodlines and traumas they are born into.

Illusion of Love and Romantic Ideals

Lexie’s worldview is shaped by the romantic comedies she watched as a child, which instilled a belief in grand gestures, destined partners, and inevitable happy endings.  Yet, throughout the story, these ideals are repeatedly shattered by betrayal, loss, and violence.

Her clinging to Noah reflects not love but the illusion of security that romantic myths promised her.  Even her eventual bond with Aidan, forged in blood and secrecy, is framed as a kind of twisted fulfillment of those ideals—he becomes her soulmate, but only within the logic of violence and complicity.

Love in this narrative is not about healing or growth; it is about survival and mutual recognition of darkness.  By the conclusion, the ideal of love has been redefined: not the cinematic version she longed for, but one that validates her identity as someone capable of cruelty and destruction.

The theme highlights how the illusions of love can be both protective and destructive, offering comfort while masking dangerous realities.

Female Friendship and Rivalry

The novel presents female friendship as both salvation and destruction.  Lexie’s relationship with Molly begins as an intimate, sister-like bond, offering her companionship and validation.

Yet this same bond becomes the foundation of her deepest betrayal when Molly takes Noah.  Later, Rebecca steps into the role of replacement friend, drawing Lexie into a dynamic of shared trauma and fragile intimacy.

But Rebecca too is revealed as a threat, not just through her deception and violence but through her unsettling connection to Lexie’s family.  The shifting roles of Molly and Rebecca underscore the volatility of female friendships within the novel—they are never simply supportive but infused with envy, competition, and the capacity for cruelty.

Through these relationships, the narrative questions whether intimacy between women can be truly safe in a world where betrayal and rivalry appear inevitable.

Identity, Secrecy, and Reinvention

Lexie’s life is defined by the tension between who she presents herself as and who she believes herself to be.  She reinvents herself through a new name, a respectable career, and a fabricated narrative of stability, but her secrets always linger beneath the surface.

Her work at Better Love, where she identifies and pairs psychopaths, reflects her own double life: outwardly respectable but steeped in manipulation and hidden violence.  The repeated threats she receives expose the fragility of this reinvention, as if her true self is always waiting to be unmasked.

Ultimately, when she embraces her identity as a killer alongside Aidan, secrecy collapses into self-acceptance.  The theme emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining reinvention when identity is rooted in shame and fear, and it raises unsettling questions about whether authenticity can ever be separated from destruction in Lexie’s world.

Violence as Intimacy

One of the most striking elements of the novel is its portrayal of violence not merely as trauma but as a conduit for intimacy.  The shared grief within COMP meetings, the shocking revelations between Lexie and Rebecca, and the passionate bond with Aidan all orbit around acts of violence.

Even the most intimate moments—Lexie confessing secrets to strangers, Aidan proposing marriage, or the final wedding with Rebecca’s body hidden beneath the surface—are framed within acts of brutality.  Violence is not external to Lexie’s relationships but central to how she experiences closeness and loyalty.

The theme suggests that for Lexie, love and violence are inseparable, with each reinforcing the other in a way that feels inevitable and almost comforting to her fractured sense of self.