Mystery Review: The Spoiler combines America's two national pastimes: baseball and murder. Frank Lofton is short, balding, in his late thirties, thinks too much and consistently makes poor decisions. He doesn't know his son by his first marriage, his second marriage has fallen apart, his career as a reporter is marginal, and he's chasing a story in which people who know too much are dying. Did I mention he makes poor decisions? Seems his only joy in life is going to the ballpark to watch the Holyoke Redwings lose ballgames. Frank is the unlikely hero of this introspective, noir, and hardboiled mystery about a Massachusetts town with dying industry and too many abandoned warehouses burning. The story is a slow build. Stansberry paints a careful portrait of town and characters, as Frank spends many pages mulling over the ramifications of the many moving parts he's discovered. Typically for noir there's an aptly named femme fatale, though unusually the reader gets to share some of her thoughts. After a lengthy set-up, the ending comes fast, furious, and unexpected. The Spoiler was the first novel by Domenic Stansberry, who's written a number of other mysteries, including The Confession (2004), from the popular Hard Case Crime series. Stansberry dedicated The Spoiler to Adam Hammer, a surrealist poet and talented baseball player who died in a car accident three years before the novel was published. Adam's book of poetry, Deja Everything, is reviewed on GR (3.75) and Amazon (5.0). [4★]
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