Tag Archives: Henry

Striking Out by Alison Gordon (1995) – BR00062 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
October 10 1999

Plot or Premise

This is the fourth in the Kate Henry series and is the best so far. Kate is bored — there is a strike in the major leagues and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. So she focuses on her home life. Then Andy Munro gets shot in the line of duty, and Kate is pretty much on her own while Andy recuperates. Lots of tension as Andy deals with the aftermath of being shot.

What I Liked

The focus of the story is on a homeless woman named Maggie who has disappeared, and one of her favorite resting places is covered in blood. On top of that, a mutilated corpse turns up with a very large knife that Maggie used to own. A corpse of someone who knew who Maggie really was, knew her past, and was therefore a threat to Maggie’s security. Some really seedy characters populate the story, including a two-bit child pornographer who has a heart of gold for helping street people.

What I Didn’t Like

Of course, there is the requisite protagonist-in-jeopardy part, but at least Andy isn’t automatically there to save the day.

Disclosure

I was am not personal friends with the author, but I did do interact with her online.

The Bottom Line

Well done and the best so far

The Dead Pull Hitter by Alison Gordon (1988) – BR00061 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
February 3 1999

Plot or Premise

Dead Pull Hitter feels like it picks up where Gordon’s non-fiction left off: the Toronto Titans have finished in fourth place the previous year and are starting to pull it together for a pennant race; the protagonist Kate Henry is a woman sportswriter who’s covered them for five years; she works for the Toronto Planet which is sandwiched in the news market between the stodgy World and the bimbette-littered pages of the Mirror. At times it was hard to remind myself that this was the fiction category!

What I Liked

The fun doesn’t really take off until after the first body arrives. Up until then, it is basically a baseball story. After that, the murder mystery takes hold. The clues are there for the finding: some obvious, others more subtle. Nicely written, and combines the baseball storylines with an appropriate emphasis on the mystery. And the cop-as-a-romantic-partner and mystery-antagonist-theme is alive and well in the book.

What I Didn’t Like

The start on the baseball story gives you a fairly large cast of characters that may be easy for a baseball fan to keep straight (i.e. player X is a catcher), but the names all seemed to run together for me. The baseball players also seem to have an enormously large and direct role in Kate’s life, which doesn’t seem to fit with her being a member of the objective sports press that covers them regularly.

Disclosure

I was not personally friends with the author, but I did interact briefly with her online.

The Bottom Line

Nice start to the series