Dead Ball

By R. D. Rosen

Blissberg returns to baseball to protect a player who's on the verge of making history.

Fifteen years after retiring from baseball, Harvey Blissberg is suffering a bad case of what his girlfriend, Mickey Slavin, calls 'sad man-ism' when the owner of his former team, the Providence Jewels, tracks him down. The team's star, Moss Cooley, is on the verge of shattering Joe DiMaggio's 'unbreakable' fifty-six-game hitting streak. But Cooley has been receiving racist threats, such as a decapitated lawn jockey with a note reading, 'escape retribution.' Would Blissberg mind playing bodyguard for a while?

When Cooley's streak ends shy of DiMaggio's record, the threats and hate mail continue, suggesting that there's more at stake than preserving a white man's supreme achievement. Blissberg follows the trail of clues back into the past, and finds that Moss is not the first Cooley man to be persecuted. A determined psychopath is out for Cooley's neck, and if he has to murder a few ex-ballplayers on the way -- so be it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784088361

R. D. Rosen

<p>R. D. Rosen has written or coauthored numerous books spanning different genres—from an Edgar Award-winning mystery novel to narrative nonfiction, including <em>Psychobabble</em> (a word he coined in 1975) and <em>A Buffalo in the House</em>. He has appeared as a humorist and satirist on PBS, HBO, and NPR's <em>All Things Considered</em>.</p>

Reviews for Dead Ball

[susandennis-139327 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Harvey Blissberg is a former professional baseball player turned detective and then retired and now reactivated to protect Moss Cooley while he tries to break Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Moss is getting some threatening packages and the team's management wants their star safe and the situation locked down and private. Enter Harvey.

[abvr_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Richard Dean Rosen – like Jerome Doolittle (Body Scissors) and Charles Goodrum (Dewey Decimated) – is mystery fiction’s equivalent of a journeyman baseball player. He’s around the game for years, familiar to hardcore fans but virtually unknown to casual ones, and his career numbers are impressive without being good enough to put him in the running for the hall of fame. Dead Ball, the fifth in Rosen’s “Harvey Blissberg” series, is ample proof of that.Dead Ball opens with Blissberg, an ex-ballplayer for 15 years and an ex-private investigator for 4, in the midst of a galloping midlife crisis. Dissatisfied with his new career as a motivational speaker and his longstanding relationship with ESPN reporter Mickey Slavin, he’s a sharply etched character, but not one you’d want to spend 20, much less 220, pages with. No matter: A call from the owner of the Providence Jewels shakes Blissberg out of his slump. The Jewels’ star player, Maurice “Moss” Cooley – on track to best Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak – is receiving racist death threats, and Blissberg signs on to protect Cooley and find out who wants him dead.The mystery in Dead Ball is competent without ever being thrilling or particularly innovative. Rosen provides a satisfying number of suspects, and plants the key clues competently enough, but in the end he works the “least likely suspect” principle so hard that the story creaks under the weight of the back story necessary to make the big reveal work. The climax has a similar feeling of too-elaborate contrivance, relying as it does on atypical behavior from several characters and the presence of at least one spectacularly implausible prop. Finally, there is a feeling of over-familiarity. Harvey, fresh in his debut appearance 30 years ago, now pales beside more recent, better-drawn characters: an amalgam of Greg Rucka’s bodyguard-for-hire Atticus Kodiak and Harlan Coben’s ex-jock detective Myron Bolitar, but without the intensity of the former or the goofy charm of the latter.Rosen introduced Harvey – a Red Sox center fielder in the twilight of his career, traded to the Jewels for their first, and his last, major-league season – in Strike Three, You’re Dead (1984). Fifteen years separate Strike Three and Dead Ball, in real world and story world alike, and Dead Ball is at its best when Rosen explores that idea. Harvey’s encounters with characters from the older book, now grown old, are well-written and poignant, and his reactions to being back in a world he thought he had left behind (without being sure he wanted to) are satisfyingly complex. Providence, too, has changed in the intervening fifteen years, and Rosen makes good use of that, as well. The local color and the small details of life in a baseball team’s clubhouse are, as they were in Strike Three, the best parts of the book. The mystery works well enough as a mechanism to deliver them, and – like a looping infield single that advances the runners on base – that is ultimately enough.