8 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 1999 | 4/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Preceded by The Cincinnati Red stalkings Similar Troy Soos books, Mickey Rawlings series books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hanging Curve (1999) is the sixth novel in the Mickey Rawlings baseball mystery series written by Troy Soos. It is set in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Contents
Characters
Major:
Minor:
Historical: (partial listing)
Plot
Mickey Rawlings has just been traded from the NL Cincinnati Reds to the AL St. Louis Browns, a proverbial team on the rise, but is stuck on the bench. Melvin Greene approaches him to play in an exhibition under an assumed name (Mickey Welch) for Enoch's Elcars, a semipro team from East St. Louis, Illinois. Mickey agrees, but comes to regret it after going 0 for 4 with 3 strikeouts against Slip Crawford, a ringer for the Elcars' opponents, the East Saint Louis Cubs, who win the game 9-5 despite several unsavoury incidents.
As the Browns open a promising season with victory over the Chicago White Sox, East St. Louis marks the passing of Crawford, apparently lynched by a mob of white men after J.D. Whalen, who looked terrible against him in the exhibition, said he heard him insult a white woman. Most of the Elcars and Enoch are members of the Ku Klux Klan. Mickey is recruited by Karl Landfors and Franklin Aubury to investigate the crime.
Rawlings is performing terribly at the plate, is temporarily abandoned by live-in girlfriend Margie Turner after she reveals she had married someone else when she was younger on a dare (and therefore could not marry him), and as worse comes to worst, is suspended for fifteen days after his participation in the semipro game is revealed. But his investigation introduces him to the world of Black America, as revealed in his interactions with Aubury, Bell and other black men. Rawlings' investigations take him to Indianapolis and Evansville, Indiana, even as the Klan try to get him on their side.
Rawlings learns that the reason for Crawford's death leads back to the riots of 1917 in St. Louis.