Review of ‘Memory Man’

Posted on May 25, 2016 Updated on May 16, 2016

The only person from his hometown of Burlington to ever make it to the NFL, high school football star Amos Decker’s pro career ended after one play. A lucky hit during his first regular season game caused him to momentarily die, but when he was revived, his brain had been rewired. He is now unable to forget anything, and that results in his second ‘death,’ when, after he becomes a successful police detective, his family is brutally slaughtered, sending him off the deep end.

Now, derelict, almost homeless, and grossly overweight, Amos works bottom-feeder cases as a PI. His life changes one day, though, when another apparently homeless man walks into the Burlington police station and confesses to the murder of Amos’s family. While he’s processing this news, a gunman enters the high school which Amos attended and slaughters several students and teachers. Amos is hired as a consultant on the school shooting case because of his ‘memory’ talents. His uncanny memory discovers a connection between the school shooting and his family’s murder—a connection that leads inexorably back to him and something from his past that he cannot remember, and for a man who can’t forget, this is most troubling of all.

Memory Man by David Baldacci is a departure from his usual thrillers. If you like the flawed character, the unlikely hero, you’ll love Amos Decker. Pulse-tingling suspense, gut-wrenching drama—this story has it all.

I received this book as a gift. And, I give it five stars.