The Rundown
To fulfill her friend’s dream, legendary sports agent Veronica Townsend has constructed a kids’ summer camp where baseball hero John Jensen was raised on a farm in Burlington, Kansas. Camp Dream Catcher, though, is in danger of shutting down after a lifeguard is murdered. With cancellations pouring in, Veronica must solve the mystery in a desperate attempt to keep the camp open.
Veteran sports writer Mike Baldwin has written a novel aimed at baseball fans and those with affection for the Midwest and for sleep-away summer camps (and really, who’s not a fan of those?) His heroine, sports agent extraordinaire Veronica Townsend, is a beautiful woman (pillowy lips, red nails, strappy sandals, the works) who hollers at the TV when the game’s on in a sports bar and consistently breaks the speed limit in her BMW sports car. She is determined not to let the beloved Camp Dream Catcher be ruined by scandal and murder, and to that end chases all over Kansas tracking down clues and piecing together fragments of the sordid death of a handsome but troubled lifeguard.
The Recommendation
This is a promising concept, but I cannot recommend Dream Killer because it reads like a first draft. My heart sank as I read the book, knowing that it could have been a very different thing if it had been thoroughly edited and then been put through a further round of copyediting. Phrasing and explanatory passages are repeated almost word for word from one chapter to the next. Passages of dialog are badly disjoined, as though the author had a laundry list of points he needed to make with no regard to the flow of real conversations. Readers are asked to take the author’s word for it that characters are “beloved,” “brilliant,” even “super-duper” with very little demonstration of these qualities. The book is riddled with grammar and spelling errors. These are all criticisms that are fairly easily remedied and should have been addressed in revision.
The passages that work best are those where characters are trading sports stories or the author is providing background detail having to do with baseball history. His deep knowledge and love of sports shines through in these passages.
I hesitate to go into too much more critical detail about Dream Killer because, really, it’s not a finished product. I hope that Baldwin will enlist some good editing help and re-issue the book. Every novel needs a good editor, and it is clear that Dream Killer was not given the benefit of that process.
