Kemper's Reviews > The Last Policeman

(I originally rated this three stars but after completing the entire trilogy and getting a much better idea about the character of Hank Palace, I've boosted it to four.)

Three men are playing cards when someone runs up and tells them that the world is ending. The first man says, “I’m going to go pray.” The second man says, “I’m going to get drunk and sleep with six whores. The third man says, “I will finish the game.”

I learned that little parable from Young Guns 2, and I kept thinking about it while reading this. It seems like you’d want to be the kind of person who would finish the game, but what if that meant everyone else has to keep going too so that they get stuck spending their last moments playing cards? Then that guy is kind of an asshole, and that’s the way I felt about Detective Hank Palace.

A giant asteroid named Maia is going to hit the Earth in about six months, and no one will survive the initial impact or the global after effects. Law and order still prevail, but the cracks are starting to show as cell phone networks are getting spotty and the Internet is failing. One of the biggest problems is that many people have ‘gone bucket list’ and are walking away from jobs to live out their dreams.

Hank Palace benefits from this because the numerous openings in the police department of Concord New Hampshire get him moved from a patrol officer with a year’s experience to detective which is what he’s always wanted to be. Unfortunately for him, the other cops in his squad have mentally checked out and most of the police work consists of cutting down the people who have hung themselves. When Hank is working what looks like another routine case of suicide in a fast food joint's restroom, he sees some oddities that make him think it’s a homicide, but no one except him seems to care.

This is a helluva an intriguing concept. I particularly liked how the fabric of society is portrayed as starting to fray at the edges. Most people who are working are doing so only because they need money to live until Maia hits so motivation levels are pretty low. One especially clever touch is that the US government has enacted emergency laws that allows citizens to be jailed without trial for minor offenses, and this means that getting arrested is essentially a death sentence since you’ll be held in a cell until the big boom. So while there is some black market stuff going on, the criminals are terrified of getting caught, and this has kept a lid on illegal activity.

The thing that dragged this story down for me was the character of Hank. He’s an earnest rule abider and eager young detective at a point where the rules don’t matter much and nobody really wants to investigate anything. He’s determined to finish the game, and that should make him admirable. The problem is that Hank’s dream was always to be a detective which means that he is living out his personal bucket list instead of seeming noble by carrying on with his duty. It’s also his way of avoiding dealing with the impending doom, and he never sees the irony when he repeatedly says, “A man is dead.” as a justification for his insistence on pushing the investigation when no one else cares.

And I gotta say, I’m kind of on the side of the other people in this book. Hank is oblivious to the impact his investigation has on anyone else. When he demands an autopsy, the coroner coldly tells him that she��s missing her daughter’s music recital to do it and asks him if he knows how many more recitals she’ll get to see. But Hank doesn’t care. A man is dead slightly ahead of the rest of the human race, and he’s determined to find out who did it even if he wastes the precious time of other people. To me, the cost was too high. (view spoiler)[Particularly bad is when Hank demands that the dead man’s boss requests some missing records from the home office even when the man tearfully tells Hank that it will mean the loss of his job, and he has no savings so he and his wife will have no means of support until the end. Hank still insists, and coldly dismisses the man’s breakdown as someone using Maia as an excuse for poor behavior. As predicted, the man loses his job because of this, and it turns out Hank didn’t even need the records after all. But Hank could care less that someone will spend their final months in poverty because of him. (hide spoiler)]

This could have been interesting if Hank was played up as more of an obsessive jerk, and while there are a few moments like that, it still feels like the author was trying to say that Hank is the hero while everyone else is letting a little thing like the coming apocalypse turn them into a bunch of slackers

This was a great concept with an interesting angle on an end of the world story, but my dislike of the main character soured me quite a bit. I’m on the fence as to whether I’ll read the rest of the trilogy.

Also posted at Shelf Inflicted.