Review – Glitter of Diamonds

Ricardo (Rico) Velasquez, recent Cuban emigrant, quickly becomes the controversial “bad boy” of baseball after he’s recruited for the famous Canadian baseball team, The Toronto Matrix. His fierce competitive spirit and extraordinary pitching skills bring him sudden and unprecedented favor, fame, and fortune. Instead of being grateful, his erratic behavior, from throwing baseballs through television screens to cursing his team mates on and off the ballfield, tarnishes the team’s family-friendly reputation. The star pitcher’s behavior can no longer be explained away by “cultural differences.”

Hoping to improve Rico’s behavior, Tony Kanberra, the team’s general manager, arranges a surprise visit for Rico from his Cuban wife Alita. But instead Kanberra is the one surprised. He had hoped to turn Rico from the liability he’d become into the team asset they’d planned for-not into a candidate for a body bag.

When Stasey Simon, popular but caustic sports radio talk show host, asks for a volunteer to “knock some sense into the new temperamental pitcher’s head,” her attitude and words fulfilled her audience’s expectations of her. She didn’t know someone would take her seriously and permanently silence the Cuban pitcher’s derisive tirades and taunts. Simon’s marketing skills had a deadly outcome.

Lindquist uses the competitive world of major league baseball to craft a murder mystery from multiple viewpoints. In part one, she introduces Rico, the hot-headed victim, columnists Ginny Lovejoy and Kyle Schmidt, Rico’s girlfriend Eva, his wife Alita, and several other supporting characters. The characters’ personalities and motives are developed with subtlety, and their foibles, actions, and idiosyncrasies form a combination of motive and red-herrings that make the reader pay close attention.

In part two, detective Constable Paul Manziuk, and his new black partner, Jacqueline Ryan, assigned when his former partner is hospitalized for bypass surgery, pick up the story and the mystery’s pace picks up. Tongue-in-cheek humor is introduced through inexperienced Detective Ryan’s lack of knowledge about baseball and the surrounding media.

Glitter of Diamonds, second in the Manziuk and Ryan mystery series by award-winning Canadian journalist, author and speaker, N. J. Lindquist, continues with a finely drawn police procedural written in the style of Georgette Heyer, long considered queen of the British mystery genre.’ Just as her character Rico is a fierce competitor, Lindquist’s appealing characters, creative plot and classic Agatha Christie style writing make her a fierce contender for Heyer’s reputation. This modern-day whodunit, filled with unexpected plot twists, reveals why Lindquist is a multiple award-winning author.