Triple Play

By Elizabeth Gunn

Police detective Jake Hines has a bizarre murder on his hands and, in the small city where he lives, people are naturally frightened, even more so when the gruesome details of the murder are leaked to the press. When a second gruesome murder occurs, the pressure is on law enforcement to stop what looks like a kinky serial killer running amok. For these two murdered men were each posed on a softball diamond, dressed in softball regalia, with portions of their anatomy hacked off and a photo attached to each body capturing the cruel tableau.
But Jake isn't convinced the murders are the work of a serial killer. It seems to him that the details of the murders indicate a killer who is sending a brutal message to someone. However, what that message is only the killer and his victims understand.

This was an OK story, a pretty typical entry in the mystery genre. Jake is an OK guy with a shady background, having been found as a baby in a dumpster and then growing up in a series of less-than-nurturing foster homes. He is recently divorced and just starting to recover from the fact of his wife leaving him for another man. As far as fiction detectives go, he is pretty white bread, despite being of mixed race. He's a pretty average guy living a pretty average life in a pretty average town which also describes this story: pretty average.