Prairie Hardball

by Alison Gordon

Book Overview

It is glorious August in Saskatchewan, and baseball writer Kate Henry is on a road trip home. Accompanied by her partner, homicide detective Andy Munro, she is keen to show him the wide-open spaces of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 077103413X
• ISBN13: 9780771034138
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.3" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Find

Kate Henry, Toronto Sports reporter, returns to her prairie hometown to see her mother inducted into the Hall of Fame. I am not a baseball fan but I found the anecdotes about professional women's baseball fascinating. Even more fascinating were the characters and the description of the town. I enjoyed the mystery but it was these other things that made this such an enjoyable read. Ms. Gordon has a very engaging, witty and pleasant style.

great book!

This was a very interesting mystery and I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to reading the previous four books. It isn't often that I find a book set in my home province. I grew up near the main character's childhood home of Indian Head, Saskatchewan. Gordon does an excellent job of describing Saskatchewan.

A good read

I was in Canada and looking for local mystery writers and Alison Gordon was recommended. Prairie Hardball was a good read. Some mysteries telegraph who did it early on in the book. This one doesn't. I didn't figure out who did it until the very end.This book also paints a vivid picture of life in small town prairie Canada.

How to get the other 4 in this grand series

As much as many men try to pretend that baseball is a man's game only, there was once a professional woman's baseball league. Saskatchewan plans to induct twenty players from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball league into the province's Baseball Hall of Fame. One of the inductees is Kate Henry's mother. Kate is currently a sports reporter for a Toronto paper. Kate, accompanied by her boyfriend, travel to her childhood home to watch her mother be inducted into the Hall of Fame. However, Kate is also drawn into a murder investigation with the victim being one of the inductees. All of the members of her mother's team received threatening notes warning them to stay away from the ceremony or else. Kate begins to ferret out some dangerous information that could easily lead to her death. This is the fifth Kate Henry novel which is something to be upset about because PRAIRIE HARDBALL is the first to be published in the states. The protagonist is very likable, her boyfriend is adorable, and the story line is fascinating, especially for fans of baseball (seen through the eyes of Canadians). I strongly recommend this novel and hope that the previous four make an American appearance soon. Harriet Klausner

Pleasant, gentle, oh,so Canadian!

Gordon's mysteries like those of other Canadian writers of this genre (Bowen, Wright(LR,Eric)} are really excuses for depicting fascinating characters. The prairies come alive in this book, the little old ladies waiting to be inducted into the local Baseball Hall of fame are real characters! The plot takes a few surprising twists. There really is no "detection" to speak of since Kate Henry is handed the solution on a platter. But then that hardly matters. What one really recalls at the end are the characters and the setting!