A notable lawyer turns up dead in the bathroom at a dinner to honor his charity work. By the next day, someone's broken into his law office, though it's unclear what, if anything, was stolen.
Ray Donne's a former cop-turned-schoolteacher whose father was the partner of recently deceased. Which puts him on the periphery of both cases, along with his reporter girlfriend Allison, and his friend (and tech guy) Edgar.
Credit to O'Mara, he really tries to jam a lot into this book. Besides the mysteries around both those incidents, there's Ray working with a couple of different kids have issues at school, Ray and Allison butting heads over how she goes about getting a story, Ray's sister hassling him to move his relationship with Allison along, Ray checking in on a student that got a job helping an elderly man through the dead lawyer's charity. There's two brothers, one who had a brief major league baseball career (the title being a reference to his best pitch, a cut fastball), the other who spent ten years in prison for assaulting a girl when they were in high school.
The truth about that, which ties into one of the two incidents that start the book, was easy to spot a mile off. The solution to the other incident felt like it came out of left field. Maybe because Ray is barely involved in that investigation after the opening scene. He's not doing any snooping for it; he just stumbles into the answer at the end without having any clue he was so close. I had to sit there a moment and ponder if that was really how O'Mara was having the mystery solved.
That speaks to the book's larger; little tension or suspense. There's no ticking clock of needing to clear an innocent person or Ray trying to avoid being killed himself. He's not driven to find the killer of his father's old partner, he's really not even looking. Ray's uncle is police commissioner, but he's not seeking Ray out to talk about the case. It hardly feels like it matters to anything that's happening.
A few people get angry with Allison for digging up things they want buried, but it's never to a point anyone feels like they're in danger. The closest thing to suspense is whether Ray's going to put his foot in his mouth with Allison one time too many, and that only because, since we only get Ray's thoughts, I have no clue how close to the line he is with her.
'With my back to the stairs, Buzzer Guy looked over my shoulder and said, "Hey, you're in luck. It's the girlfriend."
I turned and looked into the face of Robert Donne's girlfriend.
She did not look nearly as happy to see me as she had that morning.'
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