The Last Mile

I came to The Last Mile because I had just finished Memory Man and was in no mood to wait for the third book. Decker had done something to me in that first one, the way a character does when you can see exactly how much has been taken from him and cannot do a thing about it. So I went into this one braced for more of the same. What I got instead was a bigger team, a louder case, and an unusual amount of hope buried under the machinery. The puzzle is the pleasure here. The sentiment is the tax, and I paid it more than once without complaining. I am glad I read it.

Grand Central Publishing published The Last Mile on 19 April 2016. The hardcover I read runs 432 pages and carries the ISBN 9781455586455. It is the second book in the Amos Decker series, after Memory Man and before The Fix. It was a New York Times bestseller. The Associated Press reviewer, Waka Tsunoda, praised the solid characters, the fast and furious action, and the book's willingness to take on racism, fathers and sons, and capital punishment. Kirkus Reviews was far less generous and much more specific.

Thirty feet from the door

The novel opens inside a man who has already made his peace with his own death, which is a hard place to start. Melvin Mars has been on death row in Texas for twenty years, convicted of killing his parents with a shotgun and then setting the house on fire around them. He was a star running back at the University of Texas, a Heisman Trophy finalist, a certain first round draft pick. The guards on his row call him Jumbo, which is what he is. He keeps his body in fighting shape with a punishing routine in a cell the size of a parking space. He has counted out his remaining days. He has decided that dying will be like going to sleep and not waking up.

The last mile, it turns out, is the thirty feet of corridor between his cell and the execution chamber. He walks it with his head up, and then it stops. Another man, on death row in Alabama for crimes of his own, has confessed to the murders. Charles Montgomery, the prison people say, knows details of that night that were never made public. So Melvin does not die. He goes back to his cell and waits to find out what any of it is supposed to mean.

Decker hears the story on the radio while driving to his new job on the last day of the year. Melvin Mars was a Longhorn. Decker was a Buckeye at Ohio State, and he met him on the field in a nationally televised game he can still replay whenever he wants. Two football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy, two families destroyed by murder, and in both cases a stranger stepping forward years later to confess. Decker sits in a Burger King car park in the snow and hears the whole thing again. Then he drives through the night to Quantico.

The task force at Quantico

Decker now works for the FBI, on a cold case unit put together by Special Agent Ross Bogart. The team is Bogart, Decker, Alexandra Jamison, who was a reporter in the first book and is still the person who understands him best, Lisa Davenport, a clinical psychologist who reads people the way Decker reads rooms, and Todd Milligan, an FBI field agent who wants to run the operation and does not yet trust the man with the memory.

Their first morning is a fight over which case to take. Milligan wants his own, a missing person case out of the Midwest, and he wants the war room. Decker wants Melvin Mars, and he wins by dismantling Milligan's case in a single pass, calling up every fact the man missed while he was making coffee. The scene is not a stunt, which is what I liked about it. The point of it is that this is a working group of very different skills, and Decker's is the one that pays off in ways the others cannot. Jamison pulls records and reads people. Davenport watches faces. Bogart manages the politics of a unit that has no formal authority and gets access anyway.

The house in rural Texas

The team flies to Texas and goes to the crime scene first, which is the right decision and also the saddest. The Mars house still stands on its land, a burned ruin in a stretch of scrub. The bodies were found in an upstairs bedroom. Both were shot, and the fire took care of the rest.

Melvin's account is simple and impossible to believe. He was with a woman, Ellen Tanner, on the night his parents died, and he went home in the early hours and killed them both. The case against him rested on a motel clerk named Willis Simone who said Melvin was not where he claimed to be, on a shotgun the prosecution said belonged to him, and on a motive of money, since his parents wanted a larger slice of the future football earnings than he was willing to hand over. His father worked in a pawn shop and his mother sewed, taught Spanish and cleaned houses. They were not rich. Melvin grew up with a white father and a black mother, which is part of why the case went the way it did. He got no real defense. The trial was quick. He has been guilty of this in everyone else's eyes ever since.

What Decker brings to this is not sympathy. It is the same stubbornness that made him replay a room in Memory Man until the shape of it changed. A confession that arrives out of nowhere, twenty years late, from a man who expects to die, is the kind of thing he cannot leave alone.

Montgomery and the electric chair

Charles Montgomery is a career violent man who asked for the electric chair because he likes it. He knows a great many details. The brain tumor the team learns about belongs to Melvin's mother, Lucinda Mars, and it turns out to matter. He is executed anyway, in a sequence Baldacci does not soften: the smell of burning flesh in the room, Regina Montgomery collapsing, the whole grim machinery of a death penalty case laid out for the reader.

Then the money starts showing up. Regina's house holds fifty thousand dollars worth of luxury goods on a widow's budget. She and her son Tommy are the beneficiaries of a policy on Charles. Regina is found dead in an explosion that levels her house shortly after the execution. The team now knows the confession was bought, which means somebody with resources and a long memory arranged for Melvin to walk free, and then arranged to silence the one person who knew how.

Melvin goes back to prison when Montgomery's confession falls apart and comes out again when it does not. He is a free man with no money, no job, and a conviction that is still sitting in a file somewhere.

The three boys from Cain

The trail runs through a bail record. When Montgomery was first arrested in the nineteen sixties, someone had posted his bond, and the name on that bond turns out to belong to Nathan Bedford Ryan, who was an assistant mayor in the town of Cain, Mississippi. One of the three men, Thurman Huey, had grown up in that town, and he and his two school friends called themselves the Three Musketeers. Huey is now a congressman. Danny Eastland is the founder and chief executive of a government defense contractor. Roger McClellan is the police chief of Cain.

In February 1968 the three men blew up a black church in Cain and killed fifteen people, including the pastor, the Reverend Sidney Houston, and four girls singing in the youth choir. They also mapped an office of the NAACP. They were proud of it. Years later the evidence comes out of a safe deposit box and it is thorough: photographs of the three of them in Ku Klux Klan outfits, older pictures of them and Huey's father holding nooses, handwritten letters to each other about what they planned and what they did afterward, a list of the victims with check marks beside their names, maps of the church and the office, and a film of them bragging about it.

The story of Melvin's parents turns out to be tied to that bombing. The man who called himself Roy Mars, the father who supposedly died in the house that burned, built the bomb for them. He was a bomber for the Musketeers back when he was a boy, and he has spent twenty years holding their secrets and resenting them for it. The reason Melvin went to prison, and the reason the case was never looked at again, is not a mystery so much as a machine: money, a boy who could not afford a lawyer, a quick trial, a community that wanted the matter closed, and three men with the reach to keep it closed.

The psychologist who disappears

Lisa Davenport is the team member who goes missing, and the way it happens shows how the conspiracy works. Mary Oliver, the lawyer who represented Melvin when he was convicted, is the one who lets her in. She is held bound, gagged and blindfolded, and when the team finds her she is thin, pale and hoarse from disuse. McClellan is shot dead in the rescue, which removes the man who could have talked.

The unit is then called back to Washington and told to let the case go, because the case has become a problem the Bureau would rather not have and because the people behind it have friends. Bogart cannot fight that order and says so. Decker and Melvin keep working anyway, on their own, with the rest of the team half helping and half protecting itself. The kidnapping is also the point at which the book stops being about a wrongful conviction and becomes about a system that eats its own people.

Aaron Callahan and the key

The last piece is the man everyone in Texas called Roy Mars, who is alive and calls himself Aaron Callahan. He had faked his own death, put another man's body in the fire in his place, and let his son take a twenty-year prison sentence so that a slice of a future NFL contract would stay in his hands. The body he burned belonged to Dan Reardon, the man who had hurt Melvin's mother, and Melvin had spent twenty years believing the man who had framed him was dead. Callahan kept the Musketeers' evidence, stole it from old Huey's safe, and hid it in a safe deposit box in Tuscaloosa. He also built the pipe bombs in Cain.

He wants to make a deal, so he sets a meeting near Birmingham. Decker and Melvin drive there and get what they came for, which is his account of everything, and then three men arrive and there is no way out. Callahan has explosives strapped to his body. He goes out on his own terms, and as he goes he manages to slip a wallet into Decker's pocket, because he has been playing a longer game than the room believed.

Inside the wallet is a library card for a copy of The Three Little Pigs, and hidden in the spine of that book is a safe deposit key, glued in place. They find the bank, they find the box, and inside it are the photographs, the letters, the film, the maps and the list of the dead. Huey and Eastland take plea deals rather than face the death penalty. Mary Oliver does substantial jail time. Melvin Mars is exonerated, is handed a tax-free settlement from the state and the federal government that stuns everyone who sees the number, and decides to spend part of it helping Tommy Montgomery, who lost both parents, by coaching his high school football team in Alabama. At the airport he tells Decker he has never had a better friend. Decker, who has trouble with that kind of sentence, says he feels the same.

What works and what drags

The puzzle is the best part of this book and the sentiment is the price you pay for it. The mechanics are a pleasure: a bait and switch on a death row confession, a widow with a house full of things she cannot afford, a condemned man who picks the electric chair over a needle, a library card that turns out to be a key. Baldacci plants them early and pays them late, and the team has the chemistry of people who each catch a different kind of fish. Jamison and Decker are a good pairing, and Davenport is the kind of colleague other books do not bother with. The AP review's praise for solid characters and fast and furious action is fair.

The problem is the scale of it. This is a conspiracy with a 1968 church bombing, a bought confession, a murdered widow, a kidnapped FBI psychologist, a police chief, a congressman and a defense contractor strung across two states and forty years, and it asks the reader to believe that all of it was arranged for one man's football contract. Kirkus put it more bluntly than I will.

Riddled with implausible situations and light on the research, this plodding tale is for die-hard Baldacci fans only.

The memory gimmick is also more costume than tool in this volume. In Memory Man, Decker's recall was how cases got solved. Kirkus noticed the difference here, saying the book is ultimately solved by ordinary detective work, and I felt the same. He notices a detail, or he remembers a number, and then other people do the thinking. It is a good way to keep the hero central, but it is closer to a signature than a method. The near perfect recall is also doing double duty as a mood device, since a man who cannot stop replaying what happened to his wife and daughter is the book's emotional bass note. That is fair. It is also the tax. Every time the book reaches for his dead family, the reader is asked to feel sorry for him again, and the effect flattens after the third time.

The two ends of the book are strong and the middle is busy. Melvin is a real character, and the scenes of him on death row, working out in his cell, refusing to be pitied, are the ones I remember. The ending is tidy in a way that should worry you slightly. Evidence appears, guilty men plead, a wrongly convicted man is paid, and everyone walks off into a future. Real life rarely offers that shape, and a reader who has been enjoying a story about a system built on lies should be a little warier of a system that resolves in one room at Quantico.

Who this is for. If you like police procedurals with a team, a case that reaches back to 1968, and a hero whose gift is an asset and a disability, you will be in good company. If you want a book about a man in prison, Melvin's twenty years in a cell are treated with real seriousness. If you need the conspiracy to make sense, if implausibility bothers you, or if you want Decker's memory to be the engine of the plot rather than the decoration, this one will disappoint you. Kirkus's "for die-hard Baldacci fans only" is the warning label, and it is not unfair.

I finished it and did not want to put it down, which is the basic test. I also found myself arguing with it, mostly about the size of the conspiracy and the price of the sentiment. Decker gets a friend at the end of this one, and a partner in Jamison who has stopped being a stranger to him, and that is a real change from the first book. The last page is a man in a car park listening to a radio story and remembering a football game. It is a small thing. It is also the most hopeful I have seen him.