Publisher Info: Alibi (January 23, 2018)
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Detective-T-S-Nichols-ebook/dp/B072L4LKT1
Gumshoe Review:
Imagine that the technology to retrieve the memories of recently deceased people existed. Maybe you’d want to save the memories of someone you cared about, a spouse, parent, or child. Those aren’t the memories that Cole gets. He gets the ones that no one claims because they died alone and friendless, and they died because someone killed them. He’s their only hope for justice, and the cost is for him to carry their brutal deaths around inside him, along with their smashed hopes, dreams, and loves. He’s the Memory Detective, and it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Cole may have been a regular cop once, but now he’s got the memories of fifteen lives that were snuffed out too soon stuck in his head. Memory transfers are commonplace technology, but usually they’re limited to one time only, except that Cole’s mind has been sacrificed to take on case after case to find the murders that only the victims can identify. He’s the Memory Detective, and his mind is full of tragic death, as well as lives cut short and dreams that will never be fulfilled.
His partners think police work is done by asking questions and following leads, but Cole must put himself where triggers will spark the memories he’s been given and hope that the victims can tell him what he needs to know. It’s a weird sort of detection, and he rarely gets to keep a partner for more than a case. He’s almost completely isolated from the living, but haunted by the dead that crowd his mind, and they’re always society’s rejects, the poor and unknown.
But not all memories are bad. In fact, some are so good they’d be worth killing for, and when a string of bodies shows with their minds wiped clean, it’s up to Cole to find out where those memories went, and possibly even what his role is in the bigger picture.
The Memory Detective has an interesting premise, though not completely unique. To some degree, the dead have always spoken to the sleuths that seek justice for them, sometimes though the detritus of their lives, sometimes more fancifully through occult means, offering spectral clues to the haunted investigator until their spirits can rest. Cole doesn’t get the benefit of closure for his ghosts, unfortunately, but he’s gotten addicted to the rush of new memories, even if they’re tragic.
This is T. S. Nichols first novel, and it’s a fair effort, but not as compelling as you might hope. Cole is closed off from the people around him, never explaining why he does what he needs to trigger memories, and that just feels contrived to me. Sure, he’s bound to be weird, but no weirder than lots of fictional detectives, like The Finder, Monk, or even Sherlock himself. The closest he comes to huan contact is an ex-girlfriend that’s always in the process of saying goodbye, and it’s just as hard for the reader to develop an emotional connection to him. This could have been worked as a series, where the detective solved one or two murders each novel, but as it is, it feels like a standalone novel.
As a first effort it’s fair, and there are some interesting ideas here, but Nichols is still learning his craft as a writer, so we can hope he doesn’t stop here but keeps getting better.
Short Review (Amazon, Goodreads, NetGalley):
The dead have always haunted the detectives burdened with solving their murders, whether it’s the photograph of a missing girl, or the ghostly specter of an otherworldly presence. So, in a sense, there’s nothing unusual in the Memory Detective, except that this time the memories or the dead are scooped out of the victims brains and injected into Cole’s, where they lie in a jumble of alien hopes, dreams, and nightmares waiting for the right trigger to cause them to surface.
Memory doesn’t really work that way, of course, being distributed across neuronal connections throughout the brain, but let’s not get hung up on that, OK?
Most people may elect to have one set of memories added to their own, probably someone close to them they don’t want to lose, but Cole gets the memories of people nobody cares about, victims of crimes without clues, and through him the dead find a voice and hopefully justice. What Cole doesn’t get is peace. Solving a crime doesn’t lay the dead to rest, and there’s no way to extract select memories once they’ve been added, so the inside of his head is an increasingly busy place. Too bad it’s not a happy place.
When a string of bodies turn up that somehow fail the memory transfer process, Cole has to turn to old fashioned police work to find the killer, and he may not like the answers he finds. Random House LLC
The good news is that T.J. Nichols has come up with an interesting idea for his debut novel, but I wasn’t able to connect with his main character, who’s setup by the author to be isolated from everyone around him, his only constant companions the dead he’s taken on board, and they’re static recordings of what they were, not the sort of thing you can hold a conversation with. Cole has an ex-girlfriend that keeps showing up to say she’s done with him, and a partner that can’t get rid of him fast enough, but mostly he just refuses to engage with the world as he seeks out triggers for the memories he’s gained.
This could have been the start of an interesting series, but as it is it’s more likely that The Memory Detective is a one-off novel, even though the mystery is solved, but not resolved. Alibi (Random House) has set the price right $4.99 (Kindle).