Dead
Ball
A
Deadly Sports Mystery
Michael
Balkind
Pero
Thrillers (Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-56315-453-6 (1563154536)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56315-453-9 (9781563154539)
Publication Date: July 2009
List Price: $14.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): The action starts at the professional and Olympic sports training camp AllSport. AllSport is a part of the Inner City Sports Foundation (ICSF), run by Reid Clark and Buck Green. As Reid is giving a tour of the camp to the President and First Lady of the United States, the lead secret service golf cart screeches to a halt as the agents spot a dead body in the shrubs surrounding the basketball dome. The body belongs to AllSport's CFO and Reid's best friend Bob Thomas. As the President and First Lady are whisked away, the investigation begins. The investigation takes the reader through various areas of New York, the woods of Pennsylvania, nightclubs in Caracas and Mt. Everest.
Review:
Michael Balkind's second Deadly Sports mystery, Dead Ball,
has the AllSport investigators seeking the killer of the complex's
Chief Financial Officer.
Bob Thomas was golfing legend Reid Clark's best friend, and one of the
driving forces behind the success of AllSport, a vast sporting complex
in the Catskills dedicated to mentoring inner-city youth in a variety
of sports as well as providing first class training facilities for the
country's top athletes. His battered body is found while Reid is giving
a tour of the facility to the President and First Lady. The facility is
immediately locked down until it can be ascertained that there is no
imminent threat to anyone else. Reid had previously been the target of
an assassin, so it's immediately assumed that Bob's death has something
to do with Reid himself. To make sure everything is being done to solve
his friend's murder, Reid calls in his friend and agent, Buck Green,
and AllSport's private investigator, Jay Scott, to work in parallel to
the local authorities to determine who might have wanted Bob dead ...
and why.
Dead
Ball is probably best
described as a cozy for guys. There's a little bit of sports, a little
bit of business, a little bit of action, and a little bit of mystery.
One can readily imagine the towel-snapping and back-slapping that takes
place off camera, as it were. Reid Clark is a revered Arnold
Palmer-type character, and though he acts as a focal point in the
story, he participates little in the investigation of his friend's
murder; rather, he's the person to whom Buck Green and Jay Scott
report. These latter two do most of the investigating, though to be
fair, there isn't much to investigate. Whodunit is obvious from the
start (at least to the reader), and there aren't a lot of suspects
anyway, so it's the howdunit that drives much of the mystery here. The
plot itself isn't as tightly constructed as it could have been, tending
to wander a bit (all sorts of sports analogies come to mind here).
Still, taken for what it is, Dead
Ball
is generally entertaining, and will appeal to (primarily male) readers
who enjoy a mystery set in the world of finance and sports.
Special thanks to Michael Balkind for providing a copy of Dead Ball for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Have you read Dead Ball? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series ...
Sudden
Death
Pero Thrillers (Trade Paperback), October 2007
ISBN-10: 1-56315-404-8 (1563154048)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56315-404-1 (9781563154041)
Dead Ball
Pero Thrillers (Trade Paperback), July 2009
ISBN-10: 1-56315-453-6 (1563154536)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56315-453-9 (9781563154539)
Omnimystery
keywords for Dead Ball
...
Location(s) referenced: Catskills, New York.
