Memory Man (novel)
2015 novel by David Baldacci

Memory Man is a crime novel about a man whose wife, daughter and brother in law were murdered, written by David Baldacci. This is the first novel to feature the character Amos Decker. The novel was released in September 2015 by Grand Central Publishing.
Plot
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. As his football career has ended, Decker becomes a police officer, and later a successful detective, while using his newly acquired mental abilities (synesthesia and hyperthymesia). After his family is murdered in an unsolved case, Decker loses his will to live, and becomes a transient while working as a private investigator.
After a mass shooting at a local high school, Decker is asked to assist in solving the case by the local police force he used to work for. It soon becomes apparent that the shooting is somehow related to the killing of his family 18 months before.
“Memory Man (novel)” enters the record as 2015 novel by David Baldacci. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Memory, novel and David can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25203203. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Memory Man (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.