Firecracker

by Ray Shannon

Determined to force football superstar Raygene Price to help support the baby fathered during a wild Las Vegas weekend, resourceful PR professional Reece Germaine hopes to use the betting slip Raygene bankrolled for her, unaware that he is in a bind himself, thanks to a greedy homeboy blackmailing him for $200,000. By the author of Man Eater.

Genres: Crime

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2004

About the author

A pseudonym of Gar Anthony Haywood.

Reviews

[E.R. Yatscoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

And now for something completely different. This story has some wacky, yet believable characters all based around a dumb-ass, naive, NFL star when his one night stand and an innocuous Vegas football bet placed during the begin of the season combine to get him in a lot of trouble. The 50-1 betting slip is now gold as the early season hapless team have become giant killers. Sports agents, PIs and one pregnant woman add to the plot. I hope my firefighter novels can get a following like Ray Shannon has. This book was a picked up in a cheap Mexican hotel lobby.

[Ice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reece Germaine is a gutsy, mid-30s PR exec from Los Angeles who, even in her eighth month of pregnancy, is fetching enough to "stop traffic on the last lap of a NASCAR race." Aggravated by her failure to wrest support money from her baby's father, Dallas Cowboys star Raygene ("Gene the Dream") Price--"the best tight end in football, bar none"--Reece hopes instead for a compensatory payoff from the Super Bowl betting slip that Raygene, flaunting his success and foolishly ignoring league regulations, had given her during their all-too-brief fling.

If the "lousiest team in football," the Arizona Cardinals, pulls off the impossible by winning the latest Super Bowl, that slip will be worth a cool $1.25 million. Unfortunately, Reece isn't the only one who knows this; so does Raygene--and he could sure use that dough himself. Boyishly naïve, he recently lost most of his fortune on imprudent real-estate schemes, yet he's being blackmailed by a childhood chum, drug dealer Thomas "Trip" Stiles (a "deeply disturbed white man who suffers the delusion he's black"), who is threatening to frame Raygene for murder, unless the footballer can come up with $200,000. Fast.