In honor of the official start
of the baseball season, I looked for a mystery or two about the sport of
baseball. Alison Gordon (1943 – 2015) was a Canadian journalist
and sports writer for CBC and the Toronto Star. She was one of
Canada’s first well-known women sports journalists, covering the Toronto Blue
Jays. Gordon also wrote five mysteries about sports reporter Kate Henry.
In Striking Out
(McClelland & Stewart, 1995), the fourth book of the series, Kate is at
loose ends because of the major league baseball strike that began in August
1994 and would end eventually in April 1995. But Kate didn’t know that a couple
of weeks after the strike began. With no games being played, she can only
report on the progress of settlement talks, or lack thereof. So when the son of
her friend and neighbor reports the homeless lady who has been camping out in
the alley behind their house has disappeared, Kate has time to look into it.
Around the same time Kate’s
partner, homicide detective Andy Munro, is shot in a prospective drug bust that
unexpectedly turned violent during which the shooter was killed. The resulting
reaction inflamed racial tensions in the city that were already simmering and
brought protests against police violence. Kate is too busy focusing on Andy,
whose injuries were serious, to pay attention to anything else. Once he is on
the mend, she turns back to searching the shelters and social services offices
for someone who might know what became of her back street resident.
The themes in this book of
racial discrimination in policing, police violence, limitations in social
support for those without conventional homes, and domestic abuse are just as relevant
today as they were when this book was published 30 years ago. Gordon works a
good bit of factual information about law enforcement violence and homelessness
into the narrative. Kate is an appealing character; her ability to juggle her
work and monitor her convalescent partner and look for an apparent societal
dropout is impressive, if exhausting.
This book was a finalist for
the 1996 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. The series is older and will likely
not be available in libraries, but interlibrary loan is always an option. The
books are readily available on the secondary market.
·
Publisher:
McClelland & Stewart
(April 29, 1995)
·
Language:
English
·
Hardcover:
240 pages
·
ISBN-10:
0771034237
·
ISBN-13:
978-0771034237
Amazon Associate Purchase
Link: https://amzn.to/3FWjhjF
Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.
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