Fielder's Choice

The Mets' disastrous 1962 season is the background for this sometimes enjoyable, occasionally labored mystery starring millionaire freelance lawyer-investigator Thomas Andrew Curry and his new bride, Sandrine. Thomas and Sandy, who finds that baseball fulfills her French passion for logic, become ballpark friends of Jerry Fielder, a grifter and onetime labor extortionist who ``always thought that a straight line was the most boring distance between two points.'' They're among the small group that Jerry invites to the Mets-Braves night game of September 26 in which the Mets become the major leagues' losingest team ever. The Currys go home early, before their host is icepicked to death. The theft of Sandy's scorecard eventually points to the identity of the killer, but by that time the reader may be fed up with insider baseball and insider contract law. Bowen, a Milwaukee lawyer, introduced his likable couple in Badger Game. (June)