Copyright 2017 by David Baldacci. Published by Grand Central Publishing, New York.
This is #3 in the Memory Man series by Baldacci. I don’t believe I have read the first two. I am sure I would have remembered (get it?). If you are interested in this book it is probably best that you read the earlier ones first as there are a lot of references in this one to events that occurred in the earlier ones.
The “Memory Man” is Amos Decker, a former homeless football player who, due to a football concussion, now has perfect memory. He forgets nothing that he reads or experiences. But he has also become somewhat autistic and has no social skills. This makes him both extremely valuable and extremely irritating to his colleagues in his new job as a detective at the FBI.
The book begins with Decker witnessing a murder – a man, walking outside FBI headquarters – abruptly stops, pulls a gun and executes a woman passing by him on the sidewalk. He then turns the gun on himself and commits suicide. Tragic, random violence? So it would seem. But the man is a respected businessman with top secret contracts with several federal intelligence agencies. The woman is a substitute schoolteacher and a volunteer at a hospice. Decker needs to find out why this murder/suicide occurred – he doesn’t believe it was random – and why it occurred outside FBI headquarters.
The answers slowly emerge, mostly due to Decker’s amazing recall and his ability to ask the right questions. The Defense Intelligence Agency gets involved because the murderer’s name was heard in chatter involving Middle East terrorists. The pressure to solve the mystery intensifies, helped along by attempts to kill Decker and his team.
The unraveling of the mystery occurs at a nice pace, thanks to Baldacci’s storytelling skill. And things come together quite plausibly at the end.
8 out of 10.