Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM
![[5 stars]](../images/spots/6_paw_50.gif)
Murder at the Foul Line: Original Tales of Hoop Dreams and Deaths from Today's Great Writers
Amazon US TPB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada TPB Amazon Canada HC
Otto Penzler
Class/Genre: Mystery Sports [Short Stories]
Mysterious Press, $18.95 trade paperback, 348 pages
Basketball and crime seem to go together. I don’t follow the game, you understand, but I read the headlines. Kobe Bryant, Latrell Sprewell, Jayson Williams, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson—they may not be hardened criminals, but they’ve all had their day in court. Drugs, violence, illegal weapons—you name it, a basketball player has probably been arrested for it.
So it was pretty much a natural choice for Otto Penzler to take basketball as the theme for his latest anthology. As Penzler says in his introduction, it’s “a natural combination, like ham and eggs, Laurel and Hardy, yin and yang. Or, to put it more darkly, it’s a predictably unnatural combination, like Michael Jackson and little boys, S&M, Paris Hilton and farm animals, and the team of buffoons (sorry, self-described ‘idiots’) known as the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox.”
As usual, Penzler gets the best of the best to write original stories for this collection. Lawrence Block, Grand Master and Diamond Dagger award winner, contributes a new story about his hitman, Keller, who finds himself in Indiana at a Pacers’ game, wondering why he’s been hired. Robert B. Parker teams up with his wife Joan to bring readers a snappy little story about a college star who seeks unlikely defensive help to beat a sexual assault rap. Parnell Hall’s private investigator Stanley Hastings looks into the death of a star player at a small college.
That’s only a small sampling of the terrific stories in Murder on the Foul Line. The line-up here is truly a crime-fiction dream team, with writers ranging from George Pelecanos to Laurie R. King.
Catherine Thompson - RAM
Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM
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