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Most baseball fans in North America consider the sport to be an exciting pastime but little more than that. Even professional ball players tend to see it, at most, as a challenging and rewarding career. Yet for many young players in third world countries the game is a dangling golden ticket, a chance to escape poverty and carve out for themselves a new future if they can only be lucky enough and skilled enough to grab it. Toro Rodriguez, a Cuban slugger who is also an expert fielder, is one of the few fortunate ones to make it big in the major leagues, but the price he pays for his success and freedom is a missing family sequestered somewhere in his native country by a government that wants him back.
In this fast-paced fifth installment in his Sharon O'Mara mystery-thriller series, Randall combines the world of international baseball with political repression, diamond smuggling, and murder. O'Mara, a tough veteran of the Iraqi War and successful problem solver, is asked to go on a search-and-rescue mission to Cuba to retrieve Rodriquez's family. Meanwhile, her pal Kevin Bryan finds himself embroiled in helping stop a diamonds for guns operation that stretches from the Caribbean to Europe and then down into Africa. Both Sharon and Kevin will need all of their skills and wits to survive in separate assignments that are actually very much intertwined.
Randall exhibits all of the tools of a top-notch thriller writer. However, unlike many authors in the field he opts for more realistic action than the overblown variety. Expertly employing the techniques of backstory, character development, believable dialogue, and rising suspense, he has crafted a story that can stand toe-to-toe with some of the best examples in the genre out there.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review