Murder at the Foul Line: Original Tales of Hoop Dreams and Deaths from Today's Great Writers » (Unabridged)

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing firm Otto Penzler Books. He is a recipient of an Edgar Award for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection and the Ellery Queen Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his many contributions to the field. He is the editor of The Vampire Archives and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which was a New York Times bestseller.

When murder, mystery and suspense are thrown onto the court, basketball can become a deadly game. Amazing athletic displays, astronomical salaries, outrageous bets, rich and famous owners, coaches, managers and groupies...all are part of the game of hoops and appear in this collection, the fifth in the popular series by noted mystery anthologist Otto Penzler. With contributions from the finest names in crime and suspense writing today, including Jeffery Deaver, Brendan DuBois, Lawrence Block, Laurie R. King and more...this latest collection is sure to please hoops fans and mystery lovers both.

Publishers Weekly

As Penzler suggests in the introduction to his latest sports-themed anthology, basketball and crime go together like "ham and eggs" or, more darkly, like "Michael Jackson and little boys." The results, in any event, are always readable. Penzler's choice of contributors is varied and often surprising: sportswriter Mike Lupica is a natural, as is R.D. Rosen, author of the Edgar-winning Harvey Blissberg series about a professional baseball player. But Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell series? Her story, "Cat's Paw," is one of the best, about a teacher who coaches a girl's junior high school basketball team, refers to herself as a "twenty-nine-year-old virgin" and has her life shaken up when she almost runs over a cat on the highway. Also strong is George P. Pelecanos's "String Music," in which a streetwise D.C. kid survives the problems of his daily life by playing pickup basketball: "In pickup, see, you can pretty much freestyle, try everything out you been practicing on your own," he tells us, summing up the spirit of this lively volume. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.