Customer Reviews

Murder at Fenway Park

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Troy Soos has started a wonderful series with this first installment of the Mickey Rawlings mysteries. The combination of the early 1900s time period, the freshness of a young kid new to the big leagues, and a murder intertwined with baseball is great. It is an easy and quick read. The setting plays a big part of the appeal of this mystery novel--which Soos masterfully creates. The mystery/plot is believable and does keep the reader in suspense. I eagerly await each installment of this series. Soos writing seems to get progressively better.

There is just the right mixture of baseball, mayhem, and 1921 events to make a fine book. The author's subsequent baseball mysteries are a little better, but this one certainly satisies. Of course, if you're not a baseball fan, this may leave you a little cold--no pun about death intended.

I like baseball, I like historical fiction, and I like murder mysteries. This book is an enjoyable combination of all three of those.

As you have probably gathered by now, the protagonist is a baseball player in 1912 who has just joined the Boston Red Sox. Just as he arrives at Fenway Park, he stumbles across a body -- and his adventures begin.

There are several things that make this story work. One of them is that Our Hero isn't impressively intelligent. He's realistically drawn, and he makes realistically dumb mistakes.

The author also does a good job of capturing the sensibilities of the era outside the news headlines (such as the Titanic sinking); Mickey likes those newfangled movies, even if he has to sneak to see them because the baseball pros are concerned that the flickering lights are bad for his eyes. And I had been unaware of the Highlanders, who played in a baseball stadium in New Jersey in which attendees walked across the field to get to-and-from their seats.

There's just enough baseball to make the story fun for the casual fan (Go Diamondbacks!), without making the reader drown in statistics or who-did-what at the plate. Some of the characters are famous names that you'll recognize -- such as Ty Cobb, who apparently was a real jerk even if he was a great baseball player. I found the history charming rather than tedious (I'm not one for reciting baseball history).

The mystery -- who did it? -- is good but not astonishing. However, the rest of the book is so much fun that I didn't mind in the least.

If you're looking for a summer beach read, this would be a heck of a good choice.

This is one of the best novels I've read in my life! I bought it in New England, thinking that Soos must be a local writer. He captured the essence of New England at the turn of the century.

Any serious baseball fan has to read this book while on a trip to Boston (which must, of course, include a trip to Fenway!)

Bravo, Mr. Soos!

I am not interested in baseball or the Red Sox (and I'm from Boston), but I found this book very interesting and fast reading. I enjoyed the bits of history and could see in my mind the places in Boston that were written about. I enjoyed it very much. (ps: I even checked some of the facts to see if they were acurate and most were!!).

By using a baseball player as a detective, Troy Soos, gives us the possibility of finding the murder together with him, because his hero is nothing special and the lines of thought are very common. Different from other detective books, in which the authors try to create a very difficult line of thinking to make the hero look greater than an normal human being, Mickey the hero of Troy is just that: A Normal Human Being.

The first installment of the Mickey Rawlings series leaves you hoping that both the hero and the character will mature as things progress. "Murder at Fenway Park" is linear, neat little bit of amatuer sleuth fiction, but nothing spectacular. The writing and the plot are a little too flat.

The little bits of baseball history that are threaded through the book are very nice, but the descriptions of the character playing in the games become very tedious and really do nothing to move the story along. They're the sort of descriptions that you'll find in the sports section of any newspaper during the summer. For someone who is clearly passionate about the game of baseball, Soos descriptions of play are surprisingly mundane.

And in spite of the book's historical setting, the day-to-day events of the era seem to be dropped in for effect, rather than interwoven into the fabric of the story. And our hero Mickey seems to have quite a few anachronistic notions about forensic evidence for a boy who grew up in rural New Jersey at the turn of the century. These will come across as patently absurd to fans of historical mysteries.

Still, there's a simple charm to the book that shows through, and the book leaves you wanting to give Soos one more chance. Maybe in the next installment the writing perks up and is a little less grade-school level. And maybe the descriptions of life around a baseball locker room are a little less G-rated and stilted. And maybe the plot isn't wrapped up so tidily at the end of the story.

I'm rooting for Soos and his hero Rawlings to get better, because the premise of his series is so engaging. But if it keeps up like this, it's not going to cut it.

Mickey Rawlings arrives for duty on the Red Sox, only to find a dead body at his entrance to Fenway Park. The mystery later evolves into evidence implicating Mickey as the murderer. Along the way, Mickey suspects almost everybody on his team and several ballplayers on other teams of being the murderer.

I read the Cincinnati Red Stalkings before I read this book, and it was much better. The love interest started out interesting, but the lady disappeared for too much of the story.

This was the second Mickey Rawlings book I read and I thought the "Cincinnati Red Stalkings" was much better. I thought that the characters in "Murder at Fenway Park" were not very well-developed or differentiated from each other. I also thought that most of the middle of the book consisted of Mickey going from here to there without advancing the plot or doing much detecting. I look forward to reading the other books in the series but don't recommend this one.