The Last Policeman
Review
The Last Policeman by is an apocalyptic detective novel set in Concord, New Hampshire. It follows Detective Palace as he tries to solve a murder six months before an asteroid is set to wipe out civilization.
When I watch a movie, I always want to peek around the frame. Not to see what the cast and crew are doing on set, but to see more of the world and figure out how it got to be the way it is. That’s what drew me to The Last Policeman—the opportunity to explore the world just before the apocalypse and understand how it reached that point.
The primary plot is a straightforward whodunit. A man is found hanged in a McDonald’s, and only Detective Palace believes it’s murder; suicides, especially by hanging, are common in Concord now that the world is ending. A secondary plot follows Palace’s younger sister, Nico, whose husband has gone missing.
My favorite parts of The Last Policeman are the flashbacks and glimpses of the outside world: the day the asteroid was first announced, the news conference when the impact probability hit 100%, the brewing war with Pakistan to prevent them from nuking the asteroid, and the slow breakdown of society as people abandon their old lives to live as they’ve always wanted, now that they can see the end coming. It made me think about how I would handle the end of the world. The book is similar to Gun, with Occasional Music, in that the world is the main attraction and the detective story is secondary. And like Gun, with Occasional Music, The Last Policeman doesn’t quite give me enough of the world.
The mystery itself was fine. I was misled by several red herrings, so much so that at one point I thought the main mystery was solved and the rest of the story would focus on the Nico plot. In the end, the Nico plot drags the book down: we discover she’s a calculating psychopath who married her husband to send him to his death in search of the government’s secret plan to save the world. This revelation comes out of nowhere and is clearly setting up the thread that ties all three novels together. I hope it’s another red herring though, because the hopelessness of the book is so compelling that I would hate to have it rendered pointless.
The Last Policeman is a fast and fun read, and I look forward to seeing how the world changes as the asteroid gets closer in Countdown City.