Fourth Down
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Once Ed Buck, sports reporter, and Adam Benson, star quarterback for the Chicago Bears, played football on the same college team. Years later, they are still close friends. In New York for a game against the Giants, Benson hands Buck the biggest story of his career.
Gambling on football is one of the country's leading "industries," and the mob's been forcing Benson to throw games. The quarterback has had enough. Sunday, he tells Buck, he's playing to win, and to hell with the mob. After the game, Buck can run with the story.
Adam Benson never makes it off the field alive, and Ed Buck suspects his friend was murdered. Buck knows barely enough to convince a police detective to look into Benson's death--but more than enough to set the mob on his tail.
As Lt. Gerry Keegan probes the tangled connections between the dead quarterback and the head of an organized crime family, uncovering drug dealing, murder, blackmail, prostitution, and double- and triple-crosses, Ed Buck and his fiancee run for their lives.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 48 short, crackling chapters and an epilogue, veteran football journalist Klein (Blindside) spins a compelling yarn of a football fix gone wrong. New York sportswriter Ed Buck is contacted by his close friend and former college teammate, Adam Benson, now quarterback for the Chicago Bears, who confesses that after his cocaine habit made him desperate for money he got involved with a top-secret gambling ring. Benson has been throwing games to insure big payoffs for the crooks, and, disgusted with his duplicity, he decides to defy the racketeers and play his best against the New York Giants in the next encounter. When Benson dies of what appears to be a heart attack just as the Bears have clinched their win, Buck knows his friend was murdered. With the help of New York police lieutenant Gerry Keegan, a sports psychologist, his girlfriend Leigh and Benson's widow, Sherri, Ed tracks down the murderer and finds him linked to a chain of command leading from merely greedy and seedy racketeers to the mysterious kingpin of a massive crime syndicate. The focus of the book shifts away from football and toward the shady mobster dealings. Sometimes melodramatic, the narrative tears along at such a frantic pace that occasional lapses in plot (e.g., Sherri's serious but conveniently forgotten drug habit) may go undetected. While the crime family scenario gets a bit overheated, Klein's clear prose is most engaging when depicting, with a lightweight, manic touch, the fast lane of professional sports. Players and politicians on the take, and Hollywood hopefuls and thugs on the make, are equally entertaining.
