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R.D. Rosen

A slugger struggles with an empty ballpark and a murdered teammate. 

The Providence Jewels, an American League expansion team, have been taking a beating all season. Worse, relief pitcher Rudy Furth has just suffered a beating of a more lethal kind -- and been left to die in the clubhouse whirlpool among whispers of mob corruption and violently lovesick fans. 

 

When the police investigation stalls, veteran Providence center fielder Harvey Blissberg, who knew Furth as well as anyone, decides to play detective. While trying to keep his eye on the ball, and his head above water with the spunky, beautiful sports newscaster Mickey Slavin, Blissberg quietly stalks Furth's killer through major-league locker rooms and the dark streets of Rhode Island's capital city. Lots of ballplayers keep their batting averages above .300 -- but how many have chased a murderer at the same time?

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The Harvey Blissberg Mysteries

Strike Three You're Dead

Now a private investigator, Blissberg scours locker rooms and back alleys for two missing basketball stars. 

After retiring from baseball, Harvey Blissberg hung out a shingle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a private detective with a taste for the less savory side of sports. When key players from the Boston Celtics and the Washington Bullets go AWOL, Blissberg quickly becomes the two teams' number-one draft choice to find them. 

 

What can a born-again black forward and a white point guard whose nickname is 'Toot 'n' Shoot' have in common? When both of the missing players turn up dead, Harvey searches desperately for the link between them. The hunt leads him back to the city he thought he'd left behind -- Providence, Rhode Island -- and an unholy deal struck years ago between two of the city's most powerful figures. If he doesn't work quickly, Blissberg may be stuck holding the ball when the final buzzer sounds.

Fadeaway

A late-night TV executive falls to his death, and Blissberg must crack the case before the killer has the last laugh. 

When Harvey Blissberg is hired by Roy Ganz, the pretentious, pint-size producer of a legendary but fading late-night network comedy show, he has no idea that he's about to walk right into a television tragedy. The private eye thinks he's doing a short, easy job by dragging a missing guest host out of a Times Square bar. The show goes well but just as the cast and crew start to celebrate, Ganz exits a twenty-fourth floor window, plunging faster than his show's ratings. 

 

Hastily hired by the network to conduct a discreet investigation, Blissberg slowly makes his way through the show's ragtag roster of writers and actors, many of who would have relished a chance to defenestrate their manipulative boss. The joke's on Blissberg, however, when he's forced to make an unexpected detour back to the early days of television.

Saturday Night Dead

For the sake of a peculiar corpse, Harvey ventures into suburbia. 

During a long-overdue phone call with his beloved older brother, Norm, Harvey Blissberg learns of a mysterious homicide in a Chicago suburb. A friend of Norm's was found shot in the face, but with no sign of struggle and no clues left behind. The local police are dumbfounded, so as a favor to his brother, Blissberg tries to untangle a bitter tale of real estate, bad taste, and sexual abuse. 

 

While struggling with his own fears of marriage and mortality, Blissberg soon finds himself up to his neck in overheated housewives, predatory parents, toxic psychotherapists, and the seamier side of a sleepy suburb. He'll have to retrace the dead man's steps, all the way to the scene of the crime: a luxury housing development, with a Colt .45 aimed at his own head.

World of Hurt

Blissberg returns to baseball to protect a player who's on the verge of making history. 

Fifteen years after retiring from baseball, Harvey Blissberg is suffering a bad case of what his girlfriend, Mickey Slavin, calls 'sad man-ism' when the owner of his former team, the Providence Jewels, tracks him down. The team's star, Moss Cooley, is on the verge of shattering Joe DiMaggio's 'unbreakable' fifty-six-game hitting streak. But Cooley has been receiving racist threats, such as a decapitated lawn jockey with a note reading, 'escape retribution.' Would Blissberg mind playing bodyguard for a while?

 

When Cooley's streak ends shy of DiMaggio's record, the threats and hate mail continue, suggesting that there's more at stake than preserving a white man's supreme achievement. Blissberg follows the trail of clues back into the past, and finds that Moss is not the first Cooley man to be persecuted. A determined psychopath is out for Cooley's neck, and if he has to murder a few ex-ballplayers on the way -- so be it.