Fielder's Choice

Sports wagering, labor racketeering, gray market retailing, and learning the arcane art of scoring a baseball game are all key ingredients in the second Thomas-and-Sandy mystery, Fielder's Choice. The now-married couple is enjoying Manhattan life in the fall of 1962, when life is good (aside from the occasional threat of nuclear annihilation). Jerry Fielder turning up with an ice pick through his heart in the press box at the Polo Grounds ordinarily wouldn't have caused much of a ripple among New Yorkers, who had things like the newly-built Berlin Wall, the space race, and the approaching Cuban Missile Crisis to worry about. Fielder was just a street-smart hustler with a gift of gab, a love of baseball, and a prison term on his resume.

But Fielder was also Thomas and Sandy's friend - and he might not have died if they hadn't had to leave a Mets game early. Fielder's Choice is a classic locked-room mystery about their search for Fielder's killer, and the colorful New Yorkers with bad habits and hustles of their own that they run into along the way. In other words, it is also about New York, when that city was on top of the world - and almost no one knew that in a few years it would start its long slide downhill.


Genre: Mystery