{"id":4615,"date":"2018-01-17T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=4615"},"modified":"2018-03-05T16:06:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T21:06:59","slug":"the-memory-detective-a-novel-by-t-s-nichols","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/the-memory-detective-a-novel-by-t-s-nichols\/","title":{"rendered":"The Memory Detective: A Novel by T. S. Nichols"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheMemoryDetective\"<\/a>Publisher Info: <\/strong>Alibi (January 23, 2018)
\nAmazon:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Memory-Detective-T-S-Nichols-ebook\/dp\/B072L4LKT1<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Gumshoe Review: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Cole may have been a regular cop once, but now he\u2019s got the memories of fifteen lives that were snuffed out too soon stuck in his head. Memory transfers are commonplace technology, but usually they\u2019re limited to one time only, except that Cole\u2019s mind has been sacrificed to take on case after case to find the murders that only the victims can identify. He\u2019s the Memory Detective, and his mind is full of tragic death, as well as lives cut short and dreams that will never be fulfilled.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s been given and hope that the victims can tell him what he needs to know.\u00a0 It\u2019s a weird sort of detection, and he rarely gets to keep a partner for more than a case. He\u2019s almost completely isolated from the living, but haunted by the dead that crowd his mind, and they\u2019re always society\u2019s rejects, the poor and unknown.<\/p>\n

But not all memories are bad. In fact, some are so good they\u2019d be worth killing for, and when a string of bodies shows with their minds wiped clean, it\u2019s up to Cole to find out where those memories went, and possibly even what his role is in the bigger picture.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t get the benefit of closure for his ghosts, unfortunately, but he\u2019s gotten addicted to the rush of new memories, even if they\u2019re tragic.<\/p>\n

This is T. S. Nichols first novel, and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Sure, he\u2019s 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\u2019s always in the process of saying goodbye, and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As a first effort it\u2019s fair, and there are some interesting ideas here, but Nichols is still learning his craft as a writer, so we can hope he doesn\u2019t stop here but keeps getting better.<\/p>\n

Short Review (Amazon, Goodreads, NetGalley): <\/strong><\/p>\n

The dead have always haunted the detectives burdened with solving their murders, whether it\u2019s the photograph of a missing girl, or the ghostly specter of an otherworldly presence. So, in a sense, there\u2019s 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\u2019s, where they lie in a jumble of alien hopes, dreams, and nightmares waiting for the right trigger to cause them to surface.<\/p>\n

Memory doesn\u2019t really work that way, of course, being distributed across neuronal connections throughout the brain, but let\u2019s not get hung up on that, OK?<\/p>\n

Most people may elect to have one set of memories added to their own, probably someone close to them they don\u2019t 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\u2019t get is peace. Solving a crime doesn\u2019t lay the dead to rest, and there\u2019s no way to extract select memories once they\u2019ve been added, so the inside of his head is an increasingly busy place. Too bad it\u2019s not a happy place.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

The good news is that T.J. Nichols has come up with an interesting idea for his debut novel, but I wasn\u2019t able to connect with his main character, who\u2019s setup by the author to be isolated from everyone around him, his only constant companions the dead he\u2019s taken on board, and they\u2019re 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\u2019s done with him, and a partner that can\u2019t 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\u2019s gained.<\/p>\n

This could have been the start of an interesting series, but as it is it\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4620,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615\/revisions\/4620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}