A third novel featuring detective Amos Decker and the FBI team, of which he is a member, is on the up. After their recent success (see “The Last Mile”), Special Agent Bogart’s people are on the move to Washington DC, to bring their skills to bear on some criminal action in the capital. Decker does not welcome the disruption. But, when a man walking in front of him by the Hoover Building shoots an apparently random woman and then himself, these are not the kind of events Decker can shrug off. Cue a convoluted investigation with more twists and turns than an Olympic diver!
In common with the best thriller writers, Baldacci deftly maintains an almost breathless pace at times. However, the presence of familiar characters from the earlier novels in the trilogy and their deepening relationships with the key protagonist are also interesting.
Decker remains a fascinating anti-hero and something of an enigma. The value of his prodigious memory (legacy of a head injury sustained in his lone NFL appearance) is well understood by his colleagues, but increasingly they also grasp the significant cost to Decker’s social functioning. Despite their efforts, at times, Decker feels like a stranger in his own body, unable to revert to the personality that he was, nor resist dwelling on the devastating loss of his family (see “Memory Man”). Yet, his formidable physical and mental presence are used to good effect in this story, as governmental inter-agency pressures and international intrigues simmer, threatening to boil over into lethal destruction at every turn.
Though compelling, Decker’s insatiable, naive drive to find ‘the truth’ seems bound to be manipulated and in this book Alex Jamison (former journalist) is more clearly seen as his self-appointed protector. Yet, the reader knows Decker is incapable of reciprocating her devotion, at least in any romantic sense.
Whilst changing the team’s location has arguably provided the author with a broader canvas, the plot-line in “The Fix” is a more traditional ‘whodunit’ and consequently felt ‘narrower’ and more predictable than the preceding novels. That said, Baldacci has left plenty of scope to develop the character of Amos Decker and his colleagues further. There are also enough loose ends remaining should the author be minded to move beyond the trilogy, which seems the preferred ‘boxset’ of choice currently. All three books weigh in at around six hundred pages, but for me, this final(?) installment is possibly the lightest of the bunch. Worth a read, but lacking the novelty and impact of books one and two.
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