The Last Mile: Is the beginning of a beautiful friendship

What is this about?: Amos Decker is back, tackling another case and with a new team to boot. Melvin Mars, a man convicted of killing his parents, proves to be an unexpectedly interesting addition to Decker’s orbit.

What else is this about?: Find out who really killed Melvin’s parents morphs into a couple of different things as it grows larger and larger as the book progresses.

Stars: 4

Blurb: In his #1 New York Times bestseller Memory Man, David Baldacci introduced the extraordinary detective Amos Decker-the man who can forget nothing.

Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution–for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier–when he’s granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime.

Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars’s case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men’s families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth.

The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars–guilty or not–a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?

But when a member of Decker’s team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger–and more sinister–than just one convicted criminal’s life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed. 

 The Last Mile introduces us to Amos Decker again in the moment that he joins an FBI team dedicated to reopening and reinvestigating cold cases. While, Bogart, his boss, and the rest of the team have their own ideas about which cases they should be investigating, Decker brings a new case to their attention: Melvin Mars, recently released from prison because someone else confessed to the crime that put him there in the first place — the murder of his parents.

Given the similarities to Decker’s own case in book one, and the murder of his wife and daughter, Melvin’s case intrigues him. And, as he sets out to solve who and why someone else confessed to the crime and how Melvin was arrested in the first place. So there are layers and layers of mysteries to be unravelled, which yes are excellent, and much more broader than I thought. It is yes, filled with a couple of twists, but ones that fit the narrative quite well and aren’t an example of a twist for twists sake.

But more than anything, it’s the relationship between Decker and Melvin really does intrigue me.

They’re both former football players and both experienced horrible losses in their lives and the thing is, they are the only ones in the world who can understand how the other feels. It makes for some emotional, fragile moments in the book that I didn’t expect because Decker is often … lost. Between his brain injury that caused his photographic memory and his loss, he was in book 1 so focused on the case, and his emotions pushed down and out of the way, I didn’t get a sense of him as much as I did in this book, through Melvin.

Melvin himself is broken, trying to make sense of his past that has been completely rewritten during the course of this book. His parents have been his cornerstone I think, his love for them, even as he was locked up in jail for his murder. The book tells us too what Melvin could have been and that in and of itself is heartbreaking. At the end though, Melvin is in a position to show Decker what no one else ever could: that it’s possible to move forward even after his loss. That rebuilding his life his possible, and it’s okay if he does.

The ending promises more Melvin, which given the circumstances of the ending I can’t imagine how that’s going to work out, but whatever it is, I’m ready and waiting for the next one!

Have you read Memory Man? Or The Last Mile?