May 15, 1998
All Mickey Rawlings wants to do is put the Great War behind him, settle in as a utility infielder with the Cincinnati Reds, and learn to hit the low, outside curveball. It doesn't seem like much, but Mick keeps picking the wrong friends. Oliver Perriman, for instance, seems like a nice enough guy. Just a super baseball fan who wants to put together a tribute to the first professional baseball team, the 1869 Reds. But Perriman is shot in the head during a game, and when Mick becomes a suspect, though not a likely one, he decides to nose around. The case is a tangled web of greed and lost family lumber fortunes that ultimately has little or nothing to do with the game. The entries in the Mickey Rawlings series could almost be classified as cozies directed at baseball fans. Mix in great 1920s period detail and a likable, carefully presented first-person narrator in Rawlings for a series that has modest goals and meets them with style. ((Reviewed May 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)