I haven't read one of these Mickey Rawlings mysteries in quite a long time. This one has been out for over ten years and I recall it being new when I first read one of these. Soos takes the reader back to St. Louis of the roaring twenties in this mystery about the lynching death of Slip Crawford, a Negro League star pitcher, after an exhibition game against a white semi-pro team, on which Rawlings plays under an assumed name. As his season with the St. Louis Browns carries on, he gets deeper and deeper into the racial tensions and Klu Klux Klan of the era, eventually (of course) discovering the unusual circumstances of the murder.
The thing I like about these mysteries (there are six) is that they star a fictional utility ballplayer who bounces around the league and plays with or for many of the legends of early baseball. It really works as a series because there is a new setting for each tale, and in this one in particular Rawlings has his best season as a player and investigates a very personal and troubling case. The author is a freelance baseball researcher and I recall from somewhere (a bio in an earlier book?) that he works/worked for the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He had the inspiration to combine his passion for baseball and interest in Agatha Christie to write some unique and historically detailed mysteries. Are they as grand as a Poirot story? Probably not, but they are very clever and interesting in their own right. ( )