Night Game: A Kate Henry Mystery

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

This third volume in Gordon’s Kate Henry baseball mystery series fails
to satisfy the audience it is meant to attract. In Dead Pull Hitter, the
first in the series, readers who were Toronto Blue Jays fans could
overlook problems of plot and substance in their efforts to identify the
actual Blue Jays players who were portrayed as composite characters in
the book.

Night Game provides neither this form of entertainment nor much of a
mystery. Set at the Toronto Titans’ spring-training camp in Florida
(read Toronto Blue Jays in Dunedin), not even the sunshine can warm up
this book. It is far too simplistic for true adult-mystery aficionados,
and far too coarse and crude for the Nancy Drew set. Kate Henry, the
heroine, is prone to vulgarisms disguised as “jock talk.” Her
condescending remarks, which touch on everything from racism and sexism
to homosexuality, do not endear her to the reader; nor does her arrogant
“self-confidence.”

Gordon is a first-class baseball writer and journalist whose talent
does not readily translate into mystery writing.