The Diamond Deception

The book The Diamond Deception is a first novel published by what I take to be some kind of vanity press. Hoping to be the first person to review this book, I found that, at least in the first few pages of an Internet search, there was only one very brief review, by a friend of the author.

If there is a psychiatric angle to this book, it is its commentary on reactions to trauma. Like me, the author seems to have some connection to Cleveland and might be old enough to remember V-E Day 1957, when I and thousands of others at Cleveland’s municipal stadium witnessed as Herb Score was hit in the head by a line drive off the bat of Yankee shortstop Gil McDougald. Herb was never the same after that. After looking like the phenom who would take Bob Feller’s place, Score played for only a few lackluster years and then became a sportscaster.

The protagonist of this novel has a very similar incident, except that instead of becoming a sportscaster after being unable to pitch to live batters after his injury, he becomes an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After a series of rather improbable sleuthing successes, he has a brief moment of glory on the mound, facing unafraid the very batter whose line drive had hit him, before returning to the routine life of a federal employee. He utters the line “Time heals all wounds,” although several successful scrapes with death may have helped resolve his fears.

The most interesting parts of this book describe baseball plays. The ball players as well as the cops and bad guys make errors, but the crime and detective story have more obvious holes. There is little character development, a lot of meaningless detail, and what seems almost like product placement, especially regarding Apple products, which are named repeatedly; one hapless character carries a Blackberry, which dates the writing to well before 2013, and there are a number of other anachronous references to different kinds of technology, including the use of audiotape instead of digital recorders. Dialogue is stilted and tends to repeat plot explanations just in case the reader has not been paying attention; the bad guys, especially, are given to summary plot statements and confessions just before being dispatched.

I found myself wondering what the point of publishing this book was. In his preface the author cites a how-to manual that he used to write the book. At this point in my life I am trying much harder to get rid of books than I was when I started reviewing books for Psychiatric Services, and I have many books still to read, so this will, I think, be my last review of a “summer novel.”