At the same time, the damage Decker has suffered goes a long way toward explaining his later interactions with the good folks who want to help him.Īs in other Baldacci thrillers, there’s a committed group of ostensibly qualified helpers (and an enlightened Fed, to boot) backing up the hero. The parallels between the two men - a football background and family murder - are obvious spurs as well. The indelible memory of this crime scene, painfully present to him every day, haunts Decker and motivates his quest to unravel the unsolved murders of Mars’ parents, of which Melvin was wrongly convicted. A year or so before this novel begins, he was first on the scene of a gruesome multiple murder, and the victims were his wife, her brother, and Decker’s young daughter. While this condition may seem a fortunate one for a crime-solver, for Amos it’s a curse. But owing to a freak brain-jarring collision in the first and last game of his NFL career, Decker now has a photographic memory and is unable to forget anything he’s witnessed since his accident. Like Melvin Mars, Amos Decker was a promising football player in his youth. The Last Mile has all the hallmarks of your standard million-selling thriller: a landscape-shifting plot studded with reversals and surprises 400+ pages to let the momentum build across a slew of short, nightstand-appropriate chapters (76 in all) a parade of characters who aren’t what they seem and an underlying conspiracy that reaches - as jacket-blurb writers are fond of saying - the highest levels of our government.īaldacci is clearly a master builder in the thriller genre, and his Amos Decker hero distinctively demonstrates the author’s knack for creating a compelling central character.

And there’s another murky and more immediately enemy in the hunt, too: a well-connected Deep South troika determined to silence Melvin Mars for what he may or may not know about their complicity in - wait for it - a heinous and long-buried crime from their past. Texas authorities, for one, unimpressed by the revelation that has freed Mars, are tripping over their size-12 brogues in their attempts to send him back to dead-man-walking status. Though back on the street, Mars is not off the hook just yet, as he’s dogged in true Baldacci style by powerful antagonists. In The Last Mile, he’s hell-bent on helping an apparently innocent man who has been freed after two decades on death row.Įx-college football hero (and long-ago Heisman finalist) Melvin Mars is the newly released man at the center of the action. Decker, like many Baldacci heroes, is stubbornly single-minded in pursuit of unveiling the truth.

This thriller, the latest in the skein of 31 successful bestsellers from David Baldacci, features Amos Decker, an ex-cop private eye and the damaged hero of 2015’s Memory Man.

Baldacci the innocent summary