Memory Man/Amos Decker Books in Order: How to read David Baldacci’s series?
Created by bestseller author David Baldacci, the Amos Decker/Memory Man series is a crime novel book series about a detective with special abilities. Amos Decker is a former professional football player who was violently hit on his first play, resulting in severe injuries and changes to his brain. This was the end of his football career, but not of his life. Now, Decker is a detective with special mental abilities (called synesthesia and hyperthymesia). His life is good until the day his family is murdered in an unsolved case.
How to Read the Amos Decker Books in Order?
Every book in the Amos Decker series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.
- Memory Man – Amos Decker’s life changed forever–twice. The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to play in the NFL. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. The second time was at home nearly two decades later. Now a police detective, Decker returned from a stakeout one evening and entered a nightmare–his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law had been murdered.
- The Last Mile – 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. 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 Fix – Amos Decker witnesses a murder just outside FBI headquarters. A man shoots a woman execution-style on a crowded sidewalk, then turns the gun on himself. Even with Decker’s extraordinary powers of observation and deduction, the killing is baffling. Decker and his team can find absolutely no connection between the shooter and his victim, a schoolteacher. Nor is there a hint of any possible motive for the attack.
- The Fallen – Something sinister is going on in Baronville. The rust belt town has seen four bizarre murders in the space of two weeks. Cryptic clues left at the scenes have the police stumped. Amos Decker and his FBI colleague Alex Jamison are in Baronville visiting Alex’s sister and her family. It’s a bleak place: a former mill and mining town with a crumbling economy and rampant opioid addiction. Decker has only been there a few hours when he stumbles on a horrific double murder scene.
- Redemption – Decker is visiting his hometown of Burlington, Ohio, when he’s approached by a man named Meryl Hawkins. Hawkins is a convicted murderer. In fact, he’s the very first killer Decker ever put behind bars. But he’s innocent, he claims. Now suffering from terminal cancer, it’s his dying wish that Decker clear his name. It’s unthinkable. The case was open and shut, with rock solid forensic evidence. But then Hawkins later turns up dead with a bullet in his head, and even Decker begins to have doubts.
- Walk the Wire – When Amos Decker and his FBI colleague Alex Jamison are called to London, North Dakota, they instantly sense that the thriving fracking town is ripe for trouble. The promise of a second gold rush has attracted an onslaught of newcomers all hoping for a windfall, and the community is growing faster than houses can be built. The sudden boom has also brought a slew of problems with it, including drugs, property crimes, prostitution — and now murder.
- Long Shadows – When Amos Decker is called to South Florida to investigate a double homicide, the case appears straightforward: A federal judge and her bodyguard have been found dead, the judge’s face sporting a blindfold with two eye holes crudely cut out, a clear sign that she’d made one too many enemies over her years on the bench. What at first seems cut and dry is anything but.
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