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Harvey Blissberg Mystery #5
Dead Ball
When a former teammate begins receiving anonymous threats, Harvey Blissberg, a former major league outfielder and private investigator, must race against time to stop a killer, in a thrilling mystery by the Edgar Award-winning author of Strike Three, You're Dead.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2001
2 people are currently reading
16 people want to read
About the author
R.D. Rosen
20 books32 followersRichard Dean Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead (1984), the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. Blissberg's adventures continued in four sequels, including Fadeaway (1986) and Saturday Night Dead (1988), which drew on Rosen's stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live.
Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.
Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 27, 2021
All five Blissberg mysteries were great!
Well rounded characters, America’s favorite pastime, and an insiders view into the behind the scenes culture of the sport, have made reading these mysteries a distinct pleasure. Only one of the books steers clear of the ball game, although baseball does peek it’s cap in now and again. I wish there were more of Harvey Blissberg and the Providence Jewels to read.
Well rounded characters, America’s favorite pastime, and an insiders view into the behind the scenes culture of the sport, have made reading these mysteries a distinct pleasure. Only one of the books steers clear of the ball game, although baseball does peek it’s cap in now and again. I wish there were more of Harvey Blissberg and the Providence Jewels to read.
March 23, 2023
3.5 if that was available. It's entertaining, but private detective Harvey Blissberg was quite slow in solving this mystery. It had an interesting plot built around both intimidation of a young black baseball player seeking to break one of the game's most storied records and linkages to a horrific lynching decades before the book's timeline setting.
April 8, 2023
A nice story, a bit about baseball, a bit of the hitory of racism in baseball and in the country's history, and a decent mystery. I was back and forth between three and four stars for a rating but I liked his not overly-heavy handed treatment of the racism issue, and it had a pretty good finish so I'm going with four stars. I hope Rosen writes another Blissburg mystery.
December 13, 2012
Richard Dean Rosen – like Jerome Doolittle (Body Scissors) and Charles Goodrum (Dewey Decimated) – is mystery fiction’s equivalent of a journeyman baseball player. He’s around the game for years, familiar to hardcore fans but virtually unknown to casual ones, and his career numbers are impressive without being good enough to put him in the running for the hall of fame. Dead Ball, the fifth in Rosen’s “Harvey Blissberg” series, is ample proof of that.
Dead Ball opens with Blissberg, an ex-ballplayer for 15 years and an ex-private investigator for 4, in the midst of a galloping midlife crisis. Dissatisfied with his new career as a motivational speaker and his longstanding relationship with ESPN reporter Mickey Slavin, he’s a sharply etched character, but not one you’d want to spend 20, much less 220, pages with. No matter: A call from the owner of the Providence Jewels shakes Blissberg out of his slump. The Jewels’ star player, Maurice “Moss” Cooley – on track to best Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak – is receiving racist death threats, and Blissberg signs on to protect Cooley and find out who wants him dead.
The mystery in Dead Ball is competent without ever being thrilling or particularly innovative. Rosen provides a satisfying number of suspects, and plants the key clues competently enough, but in the end he works the “least likely suspect” principle so hard that the story creaks under the weight of the back story necessary to make the big reveal work. The climax has a similar feeling of too-elaborate contrivance, relying as it does on atypical behavior from several characters and the presence of at least one spectacularly implausible prop. Finally, there is a feeling of over-familiarity. Harvey, fresh in his debut appearance 30 years ago, now pales beside more recent, better-drawn characters: an amalgam of Greg Rucka’s bodyguard-for-hire Atticus Kodiak and Harlan Coben’s ex-jock detective Myron Bolitar, but without the intensity of the former or the goofy charm of the latter.
Rosen introduced Harvey – a Red Sox center fielder in the twilight of his career, traded to the Jewels for their first, and his last, major-league season – in Strike Three, You’re Dead (1984). Fifteen years separate Strike Three and Dead Ball, in real world and story world alike, and Dead Ball is at its best when Rosen explores that idea. Harvey’s encounters with characters from the older book, now grown old, are well-written and poignant, and his reactions to being back in a world he thought he had left behind (without being sure he wanted to) are satisfyingly complex. Providence, too, has changed in the intervening fifteen years, and Rosen makes good use of that, as well. The local color and the small details of life in a baseball team’s clubhouse are, as they were in Strike Three, the best parts of the book. The mystery works well enough as a mechanism to deliver them, and – like a looping infield single that advances the runners on base – that is ultimately enough.
Dead Ball opens with Blissberg, an ex-ballplayer for 15 years and an ex-private investigator for 4, in the midst of a galloping midlife crisis. Dissatisfied with his new career as a motivational speaker and his longstanding relationship with ESPN reporter Mickey Slavin, he’s a sharply etched character, but not one you’d want to spend 20, much less 220, pages with. No matter: A call from the owner of the Providence Jewels shakes Blissberg out of his slump. The Jewels’ star player, Maurice “Moss” Cooley – on track to best Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak – is receiving racist death threats, and Blissberg signs on to protect Cooley and find out who wants him dead.
The mystery in Dead Ball is competent without ever being thrilling or particularly innovative. Rosen provides a satisfying number of suspects, and plants the key clues competently enough, but in the end he works the “least likely suspect” principle so hard that the story creaks under the weight of the back story necessary to make the big reveal work. The climax has a similar feeling of too-elaborate contrivance, relying as it does on atypical behavior from several characters and the presence of at least one spectacularly implausible prop. Finally, there is a feeling of over-familiarity. Harvey, fresh in his debut appearance 30 years ago, now pales beside more recent, better-drawn characters: an amalgam of Greg Rucka’s bodyguard-for-hire Atticus Kodiak and Harlan Coben’s ex-jock detective Myron Bolitar, but without the intensity of the former or the goofy charm of the latter.
Rosen introduced Harvey – a Red Sox center fielder in the twilight of his career, traded to the Jewels for their first, and his last, major-league season – in Strike Three, You’re Dead (1984). Fifteen years separate Strike Three and Dead Ball, in real world and story world alike, and Dead Ball is at its best when Rosen explores that idea. Harvey’s encounters with characters from the older book, now grown old, are well-written and poignant, and his reactions to being back in a world he thought he had left behind (without being sure he wanted to) are satisfyingly complex. Providence, too, has changed in the intervening fifteen years, and Rosen makes good use of that, as well. The local color and the small details of life in a baseball team’s clubhouse are, as they were in Strike Three, the best parts of the book. The mystery works well enough as a mechanism to deliver them, and – like a looping infield single that advances the runners on base – that is ultimately enough.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews