Third Shot Drop
(2025)(The first book in the La Buena Vida Pickleball Murder Mysteries series)
A novel by Parker Daniels
For fans of The Thursday Murder Club and Knives Out comes a tantalizing murder mystery from former police beat reporter and bestselling true crime author, Parker Daniels. Entertaining, slyly humorous and charitably human, Third Shot Drop is a light-hearted, clue-driven hoot of a read whether you immerse as a pickleball partisan or an aficionado of the classic whodunit.
A poignant, feel-good novel that will leave your thinking about the characters you met in the book and the people in your life.
Life is good at La Buena Vida, a 55-plus community in San Juan Capistrano, California. Sunshine every day, good neighbors, a laid-back retirement vibe and open-play pickleball five days a week. Until the community's best (and least liked) player is found dead on court #3, the ball machine he was practicing against still whirring but no longer firing balls his direction. The official ruling is heatstroke, but the coroner didn’t play pickleball. How could he know that a player as good as Alan Holt would never have been standing where his body was found? It’s up to the victim’s fellow pickleball club members to find out what really happened.
For retired financial advisor Ellen Grant; former LAPD detective Angelica Ramirez; pickleball club president Lisa Lui; one-time Olympic fencer Samantha Jones; and the victim's young widow, Becky Holt, the idea of a murder within their tranquil community of senior citizens, on courts that bore only friendly competition, was inconceivable. Yet, point by point that conclusion becomes inescapable – Alan Holt, an arrogant 66-year-old pickleball savant who didn’t even exist just five years earlier, was murdered. Who… Why… How... becomes an obsession that draws the women deeper into a body-strewn mystery, while menacing strangers brazenly watch their progress. In a journey of deductions and danger, Becky learns the older man she married three years earlier may have been a semi-retired hit man, and the friends discover that behind the death on court #3 lies a staggering fraud; ruthless political ambition; off-shore bank accounts hiding millions; and the vestige of a deal struck 140 years ago by two men in a saloon, one who walked away with a gold mine; the other posterity. Where death threats and break-ins violate the sanctity of their gated community and peaceful retirements. And justice is an uncertain notion.
Populated by elderly protagonists who are neither dotty, grumpy or forgetful, nor exasperatingly behind-the-times, Third Shot Drop takes a wrecking ball to ageism stereotypes. At its core, it’s a story of changing priorities, heartwarming friendship, and a recognition that the commonalities of advancing age outweigh the political polarization that divides our nation. That in the end, regardless of what lever we pull in the voting booth, we need each other.
Genre: Mystery
A poignant, feel-good novel that will leave your thinking about the characters you met in the book and the people in your life.
Life is good at La Buena Vida, a 55-plus community in San Juan Capistrano, California. Sunshine every day, good neighbors, a laid-back retirement vibe and open-play pickleball five days a week. Until the community's best (and least liked) player is found dead on court #3, the ball machine he was practicing against still whirring but no longer firing balls his direction. The official ruling is heatstroke, but the coroner didn’t play pickleball. How could he know that a player as good as Alan Holt would never have been standing where his body was found? It’s up to the victim’s fellow pickleball club members to find out what really happened.
For retired financial advisor Ellen Grant; former LAPD detective Angelica Ramirez; pickleball club president Lisa Lui; one-time Olympic fencer Samantha Jones; and the victim's young widow, Becky Holt, the idea of a murder within their tranquil community of senior citizens, on courts that bore only friendly competition, was inconceivable. Yet, point by point that conclusion becomes inescapable – Alan Holt, an arrogant 66-year-old pickleball savant who didn’t even exist just five years earlier, was murdered. Who… Why… How... becomes an obsession that draws the women deeper into a body-strewn mystery, while menacing strangers brazenly watch their progress. In a journey of deductions and danger, Becky learns the older man she married three years earlier may have been a semi-retired hit man, and the friends discover that behind the death on court #3 lies a staggering fraud; ruthless political ambition; off-shore bank accounts hiding millions; and the vestige of a deal struck 140 years ago by two men in a saloon, one who walked away with a gold mine; the other posterity. Where death threats and break-ins violate the sanctity of their gated community and peaceful retirements. And justice is an uncertain notion.
Populated by elderly protagonists who are neither dotty, grumpy or forgetful, nor exasperatingly behind-the-times, Third Shot Drop takes a wrecking ball to ageism stereotypes. At its core, it’s a story of changing priorities, heartwarming friendship, and a recognition that the commonalities of advancing age outweigh the political polarization that divides our nation. That in the end, regardless of what lever we pull in the voting booth, we need each other.
Genre: Mystery
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