Dead Ball

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.