Memory Man by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 21, 2015

Amos Decker comes home to find that his mother, wife, and son have been murdered. Decker is a cop and the beginning of his story is too familiar to be promising. He also sees numbers and colors in ways that have become too familiar among fictional characters who suffer from brain abnormalities. As if that's not enough, Decker has the memory (and empathy) of a supercomputer.

When writers decide to use a prop to make a character interesting, they usually pick one. Baldacci's decision to use four (numbers, colors, memory, and loss of family to a killer) gives Amos an overdone quality that permeates the novel. Yes, it's fun to give a character some quirky traits, but Decker is quirkiness on steroids. The numbers and colors and DVD-like memory all come across as gimmicks, not as humanizing traits. Primarily because I disliked the gimmicks upon which the central character is founded, I don't regard Memory Man as one of David Baldacci's better efforts. All of the autistic-savant stuff is just too trite. And really, the fact that he's chased by menacing 3s is just silly.

The bad guys in Memory Man might as well be supervillains -- the unpowered kind, like Lex Luthor or the Joker -- given their astonishing ability to foresee Decker's every act and to greet his appearances by leaving threatening scrawls on walls for him to read. Other things I didn't believe: Why is the top cop inviting a reporter to tag along with Decker on a police investigation? Why does the FBI agree to let her fly on its government jet? Why, when time is of the essence, do Decker and the reporter drive from Burlington to Chicago when they could fly there in a couple of hours? I'll go pretty far to suspend disbelief when I read a thriller, but I just couldn't buy much of anything in this one.

The plot of Memory Man is almost as silly as the Memory Man character. Fifteen months after the killings, Decker is a private investigator. The person who killed his family remains at large. After a school shooting, the Burlington Police improbably hire Decker as a consultant (the entire police force plus the FBI not being enough), giving Baldacci a chance to prove that Memory Man is a supercop, sort of a linebacker version of Sherlock Holmes, or at least he would be if he were still a cop. Naturally, although I won't discuss how, the mystery of the school shooting (who did it, why, and how did the shooter escape undetected) quickly ties in to the murders of Decker's wife and children.

I enjoyed following Decker as he investigated the school shooting. Baldacci is a seasoned writer who knows how to move a story at a good pace. Dialog is authentic and the quality of Baldacci's prose is never a problem. It is always easy to read Baldacci to the end, but this is the first Baldacci novel I've read that I would not recommend, even with reservations. The killer's motivation (as least with regard to Decker and particularly Decker's family) struck me as preposterous. The last chapters are predictable. Since I didn't buy either the plot or the reality of the central characters, all that remains is snappy prose, and that doesn't overcome the silliness.

NOT RECOMMENDED