The Dead Pull Hitter: A Kate Henry Mystery

Alison Gordon

Dec 2014 · Sold by HarperCollins Canada

About this ebook

For the first time in their history, the Toronto Titans are on a winning streak and headed for the World Series—a dream come true for sports reporter and baseball fan Kate Henry. But when a pair of murders hits the team at its very heart, Kate finds herself in the middle of the investigation.

Covering both the end-of-season excitement and the murders, Kate is drawn closer and closer to the killer—and to handsome Andy Munro, the police detective assigned to the case. And when some explosive evidence lands unexpectedly in her lap, Kate is given the key to solving the case.

Set in 1990’s Toronto, The Dead Pull Hitter is the first novel in the Kate Henry mystery series. It is followed by Safe at Home, Night Game, Striking Out, and Prairie Hardball.

Ratings and reviews

BOTTOM-LINE: Nice start to the series . 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 / mystery 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 received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I was not personal friends with the author, but I did interact with her online.

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About the author

Alison Gordon was a Canadian journalist and writer. As the first woman on the baseball beat in the Major Leagues, Gordon was a trailblazer in the field of sports journalism, covering the Toronto Blue Jays for the Toronto Star for five years. Gordon was also the author of the Kate Henry mystery series, pitting the sleuthing talents of a baseball journalist against dangerous felons. The series includes the titles The Dead Pull Hitter, Safe at Home, Night Game, Striking Out, and Prairie Hardball. Alison Gordon died in 2015.