lqlarry

David Baldacci doesn't write bad books, most are pretty good, like this book Redemption.  Baldacci writes his characters very well.  He doesn't spend a lot of time taking paragraphs or pages to describe rooms or the outdoors.  In the Amos Decker series, he doesn't talk about feelings, because Amos doesn't have feelings, so some time is spent on what he should be feeling.

Decker was a college football linebacker at OSU (ROLL TIDE) and during the first American professional football game in which Amos played in, he took a blindside hit and died twice on the field that day.  As a result of his injuries, his brain was rewired, giving him Synesthesia, where in his case he sees trauma or sometimes just normal-seeming people in a color.  Another problem with his brain is hyperthymesia, which is never forgetting something he's seen or read. Like finding the bodies of his wife and daughter, or remembering the good times he had with them, or crime books and crime scenes,  perfectly remembering every detail.

Before the deaths, Amos had become a successful detective for the Burlington Police department.  After the deaths, he fell apart, became homeless and became a private detective.  After the first book, he starts working as a consultant for the FBI with his only friend Alex Jamison.

In Redemption Amos Decker returns to Burlington with Jamison in tow to visit his daughters' grave on her birthday.  As he leaves a person walks out from the shadows, a person Amos would never have guessed to show up at the cemetery.  It is the first person he ever put away for murder, a mass murder, Meryl Hawkins.  Hawkins was a man that had received a life sentence with no possible chance for parole.  The facts were stacked so far against this man that it was easy to put this man away.  Hawkins got out of prison because he had cancer with few weeks to live.  A compassionate release.

The man had one request.  That request was to prove that he was innocent.  Decker deems that he got it right the first time but the next evening.  Now his FBI partner has to leave him but Alex able to enlist help from his original partner from that case Mary Lancaster.

In the end, Decker solves the crime, but maybe his life is in jeopardy.  But as I always say, it's an Amos Decker story so by the end of the book Amos lives.

Baldacci writes Redemption and gives us a good story and he's able to make lots of plot twists and turns while he kills off a dozen people and saves some lives in the end.  Baldacci is a lot of talking between characters.  Sometimes he uses 'said' 5 or 6 times in a page, and he does that often.  But don't ask me how not do that,  I just read the facts and Baldacci writes the facts.  That's the plan we have worked up between us.  He writes and I buy.

I give this 3 of 5 stars, it's an enjoyable book that will entertain you while you read it.   It just won't be a memorable book.  I won't be re-reading this before the next book comes out.

The Redemption by David Baldacci

The 5th book in the Amos Decker series