The PolyBlog

Plot or Premise

Brad Shade is a former professional hockey player turned low-level scout for an NHL team from LA, scouting the European leagues and the Canadian minors. He plays in an old-timers game in Peterborough just before the coach and the team doctor get murdered in the parking lot.x

What I Liked

When I started reading the book, I had no memory of how I had found it or added it to my TBR pile. A hockey scout playing sleuth, with the murder set in Peterborough and the OHL? How could I NOT read it? I assumed I read that it was set in Peterborough and so I snagged it. Turns out that I had looked it up because it is the basis for the TV show Private Eyes set in Toronto with Jason Priestly as the lead character, Brad Shade. It ran for a couple of seasons, and I tripped over it on a bingefest. The show is watchable, if not high quality, so I grabbed the book to give it a go.

I should have started by saying that I’m not really a sports nut. I read mysteries set in and around sports, but it’s not really about the sports for me. About 20 years ago, I read Alison Gordon’s Kate Henry mystery series about a former Toronto sportswriter turned sleuth, and quite enjoyed them. I interacted with her a few times online through a discussion forum, which blew a friend of me away — I had actually CORRESPONDED with Ms. Gordon? Wow, he said. I had no idea who she was, I just bought her books as I liked the way she approached things in the forum. I feel like Brad Shade is what Kate Henry would have been if Alison had followed hockey instead of baseball.

I like Brad and the story for the most part. He’s trying to get a handle on a rising star in the OHL, and whether LA should draft him or not. If you’ve watched Kevin Costner in the movie Draft Day, or any episode of Friday Night Lights, you’ll understand a bunch of the concerns that Brad is looking at are designed to make sure their draft choice is solid not only for the hockey side of things but also the character side of the player. Brad figures out the full mystery and ties it all up in a nice bow at the end.

What I Didn’t Like

There are four things that took away from the writing for me. First and foremost, it is painfully obvious almost from the outset what the problem is with the player, and what the motive is that accompanies it, if not all the details. Yet it seems like for 80% of the book, Brad is in the dark. And while he should be in the dark about murder, this isn’t his first rodeo for a draft cycle. If it were set back in the 70s or even 80s, I might let some of it slide, but in 2012, it was hard to see how any part of it was supposed to “stay hidden”.

Secondly, even if the main “mystery” worked, the writing has some glaring red flags for point of view shifts and terrible foreshadowing. In at least four or five places, the “reveal” from Brad figuring something out is an opening line or closing line of a chapter where he says something along the lines of someone in the Star Wars universe saying, “If I had known Darth Vader was Luke’s father, I would have handled it differently.” They are these “exposition” dumps that just throw out a major plot point like he had no idea how to reveal it more subtly.

Thirdly, I started the book cold, so I had no idea what it was about. It took me three or four chapters in, something like 14% of the book on my Kindle to get out of exposition and into the mystery. There was a huge backstory about him having problems with customs in Europe that ate up the opening chapter that had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. I don’t know how an editor didn’t cut all that or tell him to remove it. It was a giant dumping of backstory.

Lastly, I had a problem with the plot and pacing. Something semi-significant happens a week or two after the murder, and Brad doesn’t seem to twig to why it’s important. There are reasons to hide stuff, but not all of it. Then something HUGE happens, it reveals 100% of the answer to the mystery of who killed the Coach and 98% of why…dun dun dun…and Brad sits on it for two months so that it can all be revealed at draft day. But — spoiler alert — he’s fake blackmailing the killer who is UNSTABLE but Brad believes that he’ll do what he says for the two months. Huh? And the whole point of waiting is so that they can do something that makes them look good at the draft, and saves their job with the owner, while screwing someone else aka the real Code that anger in hockey dies slow. But he lets the unstable psychopathic murderer wander around for two months, some other bad people involved keep doing their thing, never tells his girlfriend who it was who tried to kill her, etc. It is freaking weird. The timelines could have EASILY been adjusted to line up properly with draft day, but instead, there’s this late lull in Act III. SMH.

Going back again for a moment, I grabbed the book because it’s based on the TV series. But as I read it, I didn’t even remember, because the book is so different from the series. However, I found myself excited that it was set in Peterborough…yet no mention of Peterborough’s actual team name (the Petes), which he probably couldn’t do, and the name of the arena is changed too, of course. But even for the setting in Peterborough, where he could have referenced more local stuff, there are literally only two references to Peterborough street names. Including one street name that he uses to suggest someone has an expensive house on the street — except there are almost NO expensive houses anywhere on that street. And there are any number of streets that could have been mentioned instead. Which made me realize that if he had set it in Oshawa or Ottawa or anywhere else, and changed three details, it would have been GenericCityAnywhereOntario. Not something to mark the story down, but the other issues dropped it down from a good four stars to three.

The Bottom Line

Very different from the TV show, but sports sleuths are fun