The Shake: A Novel of Crime

Sex, drugs and blackmail in the NBA! This hard-driving, jive-talking debut thriller by an award-winning Portland, Ore., sportswriter (Rookie: When Michael Jordan Came to the Minor Leagues) has about as many head fakes and high fives as a Michael Jordan-led fast break. Having discovered the love of his life in the person of his beautiful, super-smart adversary, public defender Paige Prescott, assistant DA (and demon prosecutor) Max Travis, head of the Portland Violent Crimes Unit, is on a self-imposed sabbatical after being wrongly fired, then reinstated. Max finds himself up to his eyeballs in trouble after taking in his former college pal Tommy Mason--a down-on-his-luck sportswriter who is doing a story on LaPrince Wheatley, a third-year bad boy traded to the Portland Plunder--when Tommy steals a videotape of LaPrince boffing Little Bang, a 16-year-old thrill-seeking groupie and daughter of a charismatic local TV psychologist. The writer becomes an unwilling conspirator in an ill-thought-out blackmail scheme when he gives the tape to a sleazy crony for safekeeping. After LaPrince's ex-con half-brother, Wink, shows up with a witless sidekick looking to hit up the star for easy money, heads get banged, a woman is raped and the swindle turns into a nightmare, ending in double murder. Occasionally suffering from an overload of ethnic street lingo, the plot moves at fast-break speed, juxtaposed against the sweetly drawn subplot of battle-weary Max's rocky affair with the iron-maiden Paige. An entertaining edge-of-your-seat fiction noir, this novel seems a sure bet to keep even nonsports buffs turning pages. (July)