Follow the Sharks

By William G. Tapply

Brady searches Red Sox Nation for a ballplayer's kidnapped son.

For two years, Eddie Donagan was on track to become the greatest Red Sox pitcher of all time. Then one day, without warning, he went from unhittable to ineffective -- forcing him to drop out of the Majors before he even hit his prime. Attorney Brady Coyne met Donagan before he turned pro, and stays friends with him even as the faded star drifts into depression, disappearing from his wife and child for days at a time. Finally, the Donagans are thrown into crisis -- but it isn't Eddie's disappearance that causes it. It's his son's.

One morning, ten-year-old E.J. leaves for his paper route and never returns. Soon, the family receives a ransom demand, and Brady agrees to be the go-between. He finds that the son's problems stem from the father's, and that Eddie Donagan has a dark side no amount of natural talent could overcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784088606

William G. Tapply

William G. Tapply was a contributing editor to Field & Stream and the author of numerous books on fishing and wildlife, as well as more than twenty books of crime fiction, including Third Strike, Hell Bent and Dark Tiger. He lived with his wife in Hancock, New Hampshire.

Reviews for Follow the Sharks

[judiex · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Baseball. Kidnapping a child. Murder.Eddie Donagan had been a promising major league pitcher until suddenly, he could no longer throw the ball. His life fell apart.Several years previously, attorney Brady Coyne received a call from a wealthy client. He had spotted Donagan, then playing baseball in college, and marked him as someone with a great future in the game. He wanted to sign him but realized that Donagan needed an agent who would watch out for his interests. He decided that Coyne was the right person for the job. Though it wasn’t his specialty, Coyne took the job. Sure enough, Donagan was signed by the Boston Red Sox, began a successful career, and married his client’s daughter.A few years later, the career and marriage ended and Coyne lost contact with Donagan. That was until he got a panicky phone call from Donagan’s ex-wife and her father telling him that Donagan’s ten-year-old son E.J. hadn’t come home after finishing his morning paper route. When Donagan got to E.J.’s house, he discovered that the police weren’t concerned with his disappearance. They said that at that age, a lot of boys take off for a short time for various reasons and then return one their own. In real life, the case would be handled properly by the police, especially since it involves a prominent, wealthy citizen and a ten-year-old boy, but that would not make for an interesting novel, so against his better judgment, Coyne was soon mixed up in a very confusing and dangerous case. The story continued with a $150,000 ransom demand with very strict, convoluted demands for delivering the money. After the ransom was paid, however, E.J. still did not return home. And then Eddie disappeared and Coyne began to receive some very cryptic clues from the kidnapper. Questions arose as to whether the kidnapping was connected to Eddie, either directly or because of something that might have happened when he was still playing professional baseball.William G. Tapply’s descriptive writing put the reader into the story. There is an amazing description of what it feels like to be drowning that left me gasping for breath..He also presented a lot of interesting information and background on baseball. He stated “Baseball is a game of absolutely flat planes, perfect right angles, precise distances, measured velocities, and beautiful parabolas. Euclid would have loved baseball....Baseball demonstrates repeatedly all the physical laws of motion.” I had never looked at it that way. I will always be seeing that in the future.

[kathy89_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Brady is involved in the kidnapping of a client's nine year old son and discovering what happened to his promising baseball career. In this book, Brady thinks he knows best and that the FBI and police aren't handling things correctly and of course that causes innocent people to get hurt.