Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame - Hardcover

Daniel, David; Carpenter, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312146833 ISBN 13: 9780312146832

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

While visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, ex-cop Frank Branco witnesses the death of a former major league player, and his detecting instincts come on strong. He looks into the recent past of the dead man and finds a life lived at the edges. Once a promising rookie, Herb Frawley saw his career take a nosedive after several seasons. Why the abrupt decline? Is it somehow linked to Frawley's death?
Hired by Frawley's ex-wife, Branco begins a case that takes him from the Manhattan offices of a big-time sports agent, through the seedy world of Coney Island grifters, to a religious colony on the Jersey Shore. The focus of his investigation becomes an old ballpark vendor whom Branco locates in a Florida rest home. The old man's chaotic memories of a bygone era of baseball land Branco in a thirty-year-old mystery involving pornography, betrayal, and murder.
But is he up to solving it? He left the cops after being shot in the line of duty, but his wound goes far deeper than the pain it still causes him, and he must continually probe at the underlying failure it implies. Now time has come full circle, and Branco uncovers a devastating secret that puts him into a ninth-inning situation from which there may be no escape.

About this title

Review

Baseball and mystery -- what a combination! If it works, that is. Others have tried without much success, but novelist Daniels and baseball broadcaster Carpenter pull off the double play with style and substance. Herb Frawley had a short but memorable career with the Giants before he stumbled into obscurity. When he dies in a flaming car crash in Cooperstown, ex-cop Frank Branco smells something suspicious and starts an investigation that takes him to an art gallery in Provincetown, a religious community in New Jersey and a dangerous lake near Sarasota. Each setting adds a part to the puzzle of Frawley's decline and fall.

From Kirkus Reviews

Forget the clunky title--especially since the Hall of Fame is only the first stop on a daisy chain that begins when Boston p.i. Frank Branco wins a Fan's Fantasy radio contest that takes him to Cooperstown just in time to see the car crash that kills washed-up major-leaguer Herb Frawley. The local chief of police tells Frank there hasn't been a murder on his books in 20 years, and he aims to keep it that way, but Frawley's ex-wife, a gallery owner back in Provincetown, shares Frank's curiosity about why Herb's career suddenly collapsed in 1957, and his sense that Herb's fatal accident may not have been accidental. So before girlishly bedding Frank, she agrees to bankroll his trips to New York (an informative sports agent), New Jersey (the born-again niece of Herb's old Polo Grounds buddy Louis Merloni), and finally a Florida nursing home (Merloni himself). Thus far the plot has been nothing but a series of handoffs, as each of Herb's old acquaintances shrugs Frank off and passes him on to the next. But in Florida, a telltale bag of bones will make Herb's trail glow red-hot, linking his cold bat to a vanished Baseball Annie and an unusually vicious pornography racket before building to a fine fury back on a waterlogged Cape Cod. Daniel (The Skelly Man, 1995, etc.) and his new teammate Carpenter, a CNN broadcaster, wait till the late innings before their game-winning barrage. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312146833
• ISBN 13: 9780312146832
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 215