I love Amos Decker. Aka the Memory Man. Walk the Wire is his 6th outing and he and his work partner, Alex Jamison contemplate here how far he’s come socially since they met.
Decades earlier—after almost dying—Decker developed hyperthymesia. Not only is he unable to forget anything but it kinda destroyed his social skills. The remainder of his will to live / ability to feel joy disappeared after the murder of his family.
Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen reportedly started working together a decade ago, initially as editor / writer before becoming friends and morphing into a writing partnership.
I’ve read their two previous books, The Wife Between Us and An Anonymous Girl and enjoyed both. They’re clever and twisty and their latest You are Not Alone, is no different.
Diane Chamberlain is a hugely popular though I’ve only read one book by the American author, Pretending to Dance, published in 2015.
Her latest, Big Lies in a Small Town unfolds in two timeframes and is centred around two women whose livelihoods – and in some ways their futures – depend on an opportunity they’ve been presented in small-town Edenton, almost 80 years apart.
I adore David Baldacci’s Amos Decker (Memory Man) series. I was also excited when he introduced a new protagonist, FBI agent Atlee Pine, last year in Long Road to Mercy.
The book ended up delving a little into conspiracies and spies and the like, so my excitement waned a little (as it’s not a topic of interest to me) but I really liked Pine and the support cast offered in the first of that series. There were a few changes to some of the key players in the new release, A Minute to Midnight, which I enjoyed more than its predecessor. I still loved Pine… and found the plot itself more engaging.
I’ve made no secret of my love for Amos Decker, a character created by David Baldacci four years ago via the first novel in the series, Memory Man. It was the perfect opener because that’s exactly who and what Decker is thanks to a football injury he sustained when younger.
It left him with hyperthymesia – the inability to forget anything, as well as seeing ‘colours’ around people. The first book opened 16mths after his wife and daughter had been murdered, when former cop Decker had hit rock bottom.
Vengeance, ahem, justice awakened him however and he’s been working with the FBI since, as part of a small task force – though generally given a bit of a free rein.
Fiona Cummins has written two previous novels, though I’ve only read the first in that series, Rattle. Her third book and new release is a standalone novel. And it’s an addictively intriguing one.
I wasn’t sure about this book as it’s a bit outside of my usual reading genre. I don’t read a lot of women’s fiction and stay far far away from historical fiction.
I do however, often read books that alternate between the past and present (a la Natasha Lester, Kate Morton etc), which this book does and I was thankfully engaged in this story and drawn to the characters from the get-go.
The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen was a book I rated highly last year (4.5 stars which is rare for me). It was delightfully twisty and offered up some complex (and not always likeable) characters.
I can’t quite fathom how two authors can co-write a novel. Indeed, my childhood bestie and I attempted that very thing when we were 8 or 9 years old and it didn’t end well. (I ripped up the book and threw it away. Thankfully she resurrected it from our rubbish bin and stuck it back together and it became a gift we ‘gave’ each other every few years. And I’m fairly certain she must still have it as I last gifted it to her in the 1990s sometime!)
Anyhoo… Hendricks and Pekkanen seem to make it work.
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