Double Switch: A Novel
T. T. Monday
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0385539959
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Blackmail. Bullets. Deception. It’s time to play ball.
Johnny Adcock, the aging major-league relief pitcher who moonlights as a private investigator, returns in the thrilling follow-up to The Setup Man.
Johnny Adcock doesn’t have an office; he has the bullpen. That’s where he’s sitting shelling sunflower seeds after a game, when up walks Tiff Tate, the enigmatic, career-making PR/stylist behind the most highly marketable looks in baseball. Tiff needs Adcock’s special brand of expertise. Her new client is Yonel Ruiz, the rookie phenom who courageously risked life and limb in shark-infested waters to flee his native Cuba for fame, fortune, and freedom in Major League Baseball. Now that Ruiz has signed a record-setting contract, the Venezuelan cartel that smuggled him out is squeezing him for a bigger slice of the action and they’ve unleashed a ruthless assassin, known only as La Loba, to collect. Adcock takes the case, even though the front office wants to shut down his side job and has sent its no-nonsense corporate fixer and “director of security” to keep a close eye on him. Adcock is immediately swept up in a high-pressure game full of surprising twists, double crosses, and deadly gambits that will leave him fighting for his life and in danger of losing more than the heat off his fastball or a spot in the playoffs.
Critics raved about The Setup Man: “A sexy mystery with a rakish lead” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), “This rookie thriller writer has homered his first time at bat” (The Free Lance-Star), and “Teems with sex, violence—and baseball . . . Monday deserves promotion to the starting rotation of thriller writers” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Double Switch proves that Johnny Adcock is one of the genre’s most entertaining detectives in years, and gives readers a welcome return to the sexy,
action-packed, and thrilling world where high-stakes professional sports and life-or-death action collide.
sticky in the middle, where the drip hits, but the rest is congealed. It feels like latex paint. I spin around and reach for the door, but my hip knocks the edge of the unsteady little table where Connie drops her keys and purse. The table falls over, and the surprise—I’m jacked on adrenaline—knocks me backward against the hat rack on the opposite side of the doorway. The hat rack topples over, and now I’m on my ass in a sea of coats and farmers’-market tote bags, hoping the neighbor is back in
league in the world, but it can’t be gate revenue. Forty minutes later, I’m weaving through the streets of San Francisco. Here’s a better use for a billion dollars: bore a tunnel under San Francisco. The city is surrounded on three sides by water, and there’s still no freeway cutting through it, which means the only route from the southern suburbs to the northern ones is a long, slow crawl through miles of traffic lights. Block after block of all-night diners, Maserati dealers, and dildo shops.
come up tomorrow morning.” “Actually”—he looks cautiously at Feldspar—“we can have it delivered. What’s your address?” Twenty minutes later, I’m in the passenger’s seat of Jim Feldspar’s rented SUV, heading south on 101. For most of the ride, Feldspar has been listening to his messages one by one through the Bluetooth in his ear, then calling his assistant to give instructions on matters I lack the context to understand. Finally, when it appears he has reached the end of his task list, I jump
that it should be printed on millions of dead trees and sold for $26.95 per copy? Pitchers think that way, too. When a guy walks up to the plate with a bat on his shoulder, we think: Fuck that, I’ll show him who owns the zone. It’s infantile, but it’s never going to change. Ballplayers are babies, and everyone knows you can’t reason with a baby. My phone ran out of juice in Sonoma. I wasn’t able to check my messages during the long ride home with Feldspar. When I finally plug in, I see a missed
to wait. The elevator arrives, and we step inside. We’re alone. “What I couldn’t figure out for the longest time,” I say, “is how Erik Magnusson fit into this. I mean, he told me that you stayed with him last winter—but so what, right? Even if he knew you changed your name—hell, even if he knew you were Puerto Rican—that’s no reason to kill him.” Ruiz stares at the floor numbers above the door. “But Mags had fallen on hard times. I’m not sure you knew the full extent of it, but his wife left