Rating: WARTY!
This is a classic example of why I don't read series, and worse, this book is a complete lie if judged by the blurb. I know authors don't get to write their own blurbs unless they self publish, but the outright lie is a bit much even by blurb standards. I didn't realize this was number five in the "The Sports Beat" series. It read more like number two. If I'd known it was part of a series, I would never have read it - or in this case listened to the pedantic voice of the narrator (who was the author himself, so it's hardly a surprise that the reading was as bad as the writing).
I know it's not aimed at my age group, but the blurb outright lied about it: "John Feinstein has been praised as 'the best writer of sports books in America today' (The Boston Globe), and he proves it again in this fast-paced novel." If that's the case, if he's the best, there must be some lousy, lousy sports books out there. Either that or the Boston Globe is full of shift, to use a football term. No, this novel is anything but fast-paced. It begins with two flashbacks, so it's actually negatively paced! It's supposed to be about events during the Army Navy football game, but that game does not start until the final twenty percent of the novel! In the first third of it, literally nothing happened except that I got teed off (and not in a golfing capacity) by the incessant use of "Susan Carol" which is the first and middle name of one of the main characters. Seriously? No one ever calls her Susan or Sue? She should sue!
She's a fourteen-year-old female sports reporter for a big Washington newspaper. I'm not even going to get into the improbability of a teen female sports report in a major newspaper reporting on mens' sports - not that a fourteen-year-old female couldn't do it in theory, but that she would never be allowed to do it in practice in an adult men's world, and if she did do it she'd be jeered, insulted and abused incessantly by dickhead males. It happens all the time for a lot less than a female presuming to "trespass on male Astro-Turf."
As I mentioned, this story revolves around the annual Army and Navy game which is attended by the president and so Stevie and "Susan Carol" are following a Secret Service agent around. I get that this story is aimed at sports fans, but it's all sport (including the two flashbacks) and no mystery, no thrill, no cut to the chase, no fast-pace, and no thing to hold interest. You would get more thrills from reading a sports almanac or a stats book. I skimmed this one and missed the mystery - that's how pathetic it was, and I refuse to say anything good about a novel this badly written and this boring.
