The Last Man: A Novel

Walter Bannister often told himself that he had nothing to complain about.  Seen from the outside, the way others saw him, he had the perfect life: a respected judge, a house in Bel Aire, the fortunate son of a father who had become one of the richest men in Los Angeles, the husband of a woman, wealthy in her own right and just about the first person anyone would call who wanted a charitable event to be the kind of success everyone would be talking about for months.  He had everything, and he had nothing at all.  There was no excitement in his life, no sense of adventure, nothing like what he thought he had seen in the movies of his childhood, the movies that had depicted the kind of life he thought he would live.  Life was something lived by others, something he saw every day in his courtroom and never felt himself.With growing fascination, Walter Bannister tries to understand what makes criminals behave the way they do.  He becomes more and more obsessed with what drives someone to murder.  His own life an empty shell, he has forgotten, if he ever knew, how to feel anything.  Presiding over the murder trial of a man without conscience or remorse, he decides that people kill, not because they are abnormal, different from the rest of us, but for the sheer thrill of it.  He wonders, he has to know, what it would be like to kill someone.  Is that the secret of what it means to be alive, to know, to really know, what it is like to kill?  Walter Bannister wants to find out.