Alison Gordon (1943–2015)

What could be better? A mystery with a strong female amateur detective AND baseball? Not much.

Like the author, protagonist Kate Henry is a sports reporter covering that wonderful game. There's a great plot and super realism about both journalism and baseball. Alison Golden's background makes this her niche! Golden was a Canadian journalist and writer who was the first woman on the baseball beat in the Major Leagues. She was a trailblazer in the field of sports journalism, covering the Toronto Blue Jays for the Toronto Star for five years. Sadly, Golden died in 2015, leaving behind only five titles in the Kate Henry series. I shall have to space them out and savour them.

I had a wonderful time reading The Dead Pull Hitter and even learned a couple of things I didn't know about the game.… (mehr)

BOTTOM-LINE:
Well done, and the best so far.
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
This is the fourth in the Kate Henry series and is the best so far. Kate is bored -- there is a strike in the major leagues and she doesn't know what to do with herself. So she focuses on her home life. Then Andy Munro gets shot in the line of duty, and Kate is pretty much on her own while Andy recuperates. Lots of tension as Andy deals with the aftermath of being shot.
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WHAT I LIKED:
The focus of the story is on a homeless woman named Maggie who has disappeared, and one of her favorite resting places is covered in blood. On top of that, a mutilated corpse turns up with a very large knife that Maggie used to own. A corpse of someone who knew who Maggie really was, knew her past, and was therefore a threat to Maggie's security. Some really seedy characters populate the story, including a two-bit child pornographer who has a heart of gold for helping street people.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
Of course there is the requisite protagonist-in-jeopardy part, but at least Andy isn't automatically there to save the day
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I was not personal friends with the author, but I did interact with her online.… (mehr)

BOTTOM-LINE:
Nice start to the series
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
Dead Pull Hitter feels like it picks up where Gordon's non-fiction left off: the Toronto Titans have finished in fourth place the previous year and are starting to pull it together for a pennant race; the protagonist Kate Henry is a woman sportswriter who's covered them for five years; she works for the Toronto Planet which is sandwiched in the news market between the stodgy World and the bimbette-littered pages of the Mirror. At times it was hard to remind myself that this was the fiction category!
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WHAT I LIKED:
The fun doesn't really take off until after the first body arrives. Up until then, it is basically a baseball story. After that, the murder mystery takes hold. The clues are there for the finding: some obvious, others more subtle. Nicely written, and combines the baseball / mystery storylines with an appropriate emphasis on the mystery. And the cop-as-a-romantic-partner-and-mystery-antagonist-theme is alive and well in the book.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
The start on the baseball story gives you a fairly large cast of characters that may be easy for a baseball fan to keep straight (i.e. player X is a catcher), but the names all seemed to run together for me. The baseball players also seem to have an enormously large and direct role in Kate's life, which doesn't seem to fit with her being a member of the objective sports press that covers them regularly.
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I was not personal friends with the author, but I did interact with her online.… (mehr)