Mismatched sleuth

The Last Mile
David Baldacci
Pan Macmillan
2016, pp 420, Rs 599

It’s an old tradition to make the protagonist in a thrilling story somehow different from other people. He could be astoundingly smart or strong. He could be cruelly handicapped or disfigured. He could have suffered an experience that affects his every action. He could have learnt some skill denied to commonplace people.

Whatever this differentiating factor is, the challenge is to make this thing relevant to the story itself. Batman’s traumatic experience of his parents’ murder prevents him from killing anyone. Hannibal Lecter’s insight into psychopathic behaviour helps him track other serial killers. Sherlock Holmes always faces Mensa-grade masterminds, never grocery-store robbers. And Adrian Monk’s OCD helps him spot discrepancies in alibis.

What, then, of Amos Decker, the ‘Memory Man’ from Baldacci’s book of that name? Decker has hyperthymesia, aka perfect memory that remembers every single thing. He was a detective in the police, before his wife and son were murdered in front of his eyes. His condition makes him unable to forget or gloss over those terrible events, though the case has now been solved. In the second Decker book, The Last Mile, he is part of an FBI team that investigates strange cases.

It’s a pretty convoluted case that Decker finds himself interested in: Melvin Mars, a rising football star, was convicted of murdering his parents 20 years ago. At the time, he was a college kid, extremely good at American football, and on the brink of getting a lucrative contract to play professionally. But the conviction snatched away all his dreams.

The time in jail has been spent hoping against hope, only to have every chance dashed. But a few hours before his execution, he is granted a reprieve: someone else has confessed to the crime. It is a small-time criminal who had no real connection with Mars’s family. But Decker smells a rat. The timing of the confession was too coincidentally lucky. He’s convinced that Mars did not commit the murder; but then, who did?

As Decker and his team begin to investigate, they find more and more discrepancies in the case. Some kind of deep plot was hatched in order to convict Mars. But who would want to frame a college kid from a small town? And to make it worse, there are suspicious missing pieces in the story of the confessed murderer. Maybe he didn’t do it either, which means there’s another deep plot at work, this time to get Mars out of jail. Are the masterminds behind these two plots the same? And if they are different, which one is the real danger to Mars, and to Decker and his team?

Decker’s interest in the case is kindled because of several similarities between the murder and frame-up, and his own story. At this time, his FBI team is just forming up, and it has a large set of candidate cases from which it needs to choose one. Part of the fun in this book is the interactions between Decker and the rest of this team. The focus, however, remains squarely on Decker — nearly all the time, he’s the one who sees the clues, the one who pursues the case pell-mell, the one who really wants to get to the truth, no matter what. The others could be there or not. To take an Indian analogy, he’s the ACP Pradyuman of the team.

The case proceeds with the twists and turns that are de rigueur in modern thriller novels, keeping us interested throughout. Decker’s ‘power’ is used very little, his formidable detective skills account for much more progress. Instead, his familiarity with American football comes into play more often: to bond with Mars, to understand college football life. So the reader isn’t really sure why Decker, of all people, is the hero of this book — unless he is now going to be a ‘retired-footballer’ detective in subsequent books instead of the ‘perfect-memory’ detective.

Where the book fails is in touching an emotional chord in the reader. It feels like an — well-written, of course — episode of a TV show, written by a committee. None of the characters stay with you. The only real emotion shown in the book is by the victim, Melvin Mars, and that is not enough to save the book. The characters seem like puppets put in to advance the plot rather than being real breathing people.

As mentioned earlier, the story doesn’t really require Decker as the protagonist — any smart detective character could probably have filled in. Worth reading? Well, it’s better than Baldacci’s last publication (The Guilty, see the review earlier published in Deccan Herald). And it goes by quickly. Perfect for filling in a few hours of a journey. Does it stay with you? Not really.