Kemper's Reviews > The Last Good Man

Full disclosure about this review: Scribner offered me an ARC in exchange for this write up, and being the cheap and shameless person I am, I accepted it in the hopes of opening a pipeline of free books. The problem is that I’ve only got about three stars worth of love for this, and I don’t know if that’s good enough to convince them to send me more. So if anyone from Scribner’s asks, I gave it an enthusiastic five stars. Shhhh. It’ll be our little secret.

This starts with a pretty intriguing premise. Niels Bentzon is a Danish police negotiator who has irritated his colleagues with his almost complete refusal to resort to force in hostage situations. As Denmark prepares for an international climate conference with high profile politicians from all over the world attending, Bentzon is given an odd assignment. A cop in Venice has put out an Interpol bulletin documenting the mysterious deaths all over the world of several ‘good’ people with strange marks on their backs and predicting that the next victim is in Denmark.

Bentzon is supposed to find potential good people and warn them but struggles with how to identity potential targets. What constitutes a good person and what is he supposed to warn them about? Niels gets some help from Hannah, a scientist dealing with her own tragedy, and they soon learns that the case is based on an ancient Jewish legend that claims that there are always 36 righteous people on earth. They don’t know that they’ve been chosen, but their presence is necessary to keep the world from ending. And 34 of the 36 are already dead.

If I can believe the blurbs on the back cover, this book was pretty well received and won some prizes in Europe. Overall, I thought the writing was good and the characters interesting. The idea of the 36 righteous people dying off certainly had a lot of potential. However, while it was good enough to hold my interest, I found it lacking in a lot of respects.

It takes a long time to get started. I figured out one of the biggest plot twists early in the book, but then had to endure a few hundred pages of red herrings to get to the big reveal. Time is spent developing characters just to drop them the second they’ve served their purpose. (view spoiler)[What was the point of the subplot of the Arab terrorist? And Niels spends the first half of the book worrying about his wife Katherine in South Africa and their crumbling marriage, but after meeting Hannah and using Katherine to find another victim, he hardly thinks about her at all for the rest of his book and she seemingly vanishes.

This ends up being a story about trying to outrun your fate, but I still don’t know why. If the good people were chosen by God, then what force was killing them off? Was God testing them? And passing the test and generating a new generation of the 36 is accomplished by attempted murder to become ‘evil‘? I understand that they were trying to link this to the story of Abraham and sacrifice, but everything about the threat and it’s resolution just came across as murky and confusing. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, this is one where the execution of the story just didn’t live up to the potential of its basic idea. I enjoyed reading it, but found myself disappointed that there wasn’t more meat on the bone.

Still, free book!