Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame

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.

Flaws in the plotting trip up this collaborative effort by Daniel, whose The Heaven Stone won SMP's Best First Private Eye Novel, and CNN broadcaster Carpenter. Ex-cop Frank Branco is an appealing Boston-based PI and a big baseball fan. Winning a radio station contest sends him to Cooperstown for the annual induction ceremonies at the Baseball Hall of Fame. At an outdoor reception, a car careens down the lawn toward the pond. Frank's efforts to rescue the locked-in driver, who may already be dead, are futile and the car explodes in flames. Dead is Herb Frawley, a former big-leaguer of great promise whose career ended ingloriously more than 30 years ago. To Branco, there are several reasons to suspect that Frawley's death was not an accident, but the authorities disagree and tell him to mind his own business. Then Frawley's ex-wife, Nola Dymmoch, hires him to continue the search. Eventually, Branco uncovers a sordid tale of murder and betrayal. There are several nicely sketched characters and a suspenseful confrontation, but the original murder is never satisfactorily explained; the killer appears late and unconvincingly, and the reader is left unsatisfied by actions that seem to serve the authors' convenience more than they arise from the characters' internal motivations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.