Raymond Donne is a former NYC cop who retired due to serious injury and is now an eighth-grade teacher in Brooklyn. One of his students disappears, and Donne feels the overworked police aren't doing enough to find him. Visiting the boy's home, Donne discovers the boy's father, dead.

Donne is a complicated fellow, with painful memories of his father and a sometimes contentious relationship with his mother and sister. He seems to be well-liked at his school, and to have maintained good relationships with some of the police with whom he used to work. The story takes a little while to get going, but picks up momentum. Overall a very nice read, which kept me interested throughout. ( )

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Raymond Donne wasn’t always a schoolteacher. Not only did he patrol the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as one of New York’s Finest, but being the nephew of the chief of detectives, he was expected to go on to bigger things. At least he was until the accident that destroyed his knees. Unable to do the job the way he wanted, he became a teacher in the same neighborhood, and did everything he could to put the force behind him and come to terms with the change.

Then Frankie Rivas, a student in Ray’s class and a baseball phenom, stops showing up to school. With Frankie in danger of failing and missing out on a scholarship, Ray goes looking for him, only to find Frankie’s father bludgeoned to death in their apartment. Frankie and his younger sister are gone, possibly on the run. But did Frankie really kill his father? Ray can’t believe it. But then who did, and where are Frankie and his sister? Ray doesn’t know, but if he’s going to have any chance of bringing them home safely, he’s going to have to return to the life, the people, and the demons he walked out on all those years ago.

Intense, authentic, and completely gripping, Tim O’Mara’s Sacrifice Fly is an outstanding debut from a stellar new voice in crime fiction.

My Review: It's a first novel. It's got holes...the techie dude has a disk drive in his computer? like a desktop? no way...it's got people who disappear for good in unceremonious ways...a first date ends in a cop call, the lady gets in a cab and *piff* never heard from again?...and the baseball angle isn't particularly well integrated into the story...we never see or experience Frankie anywhere near a baseball and it's his future we're supposedly believing is in the Majors? Plus the author appears to be a Yankees fan. Strikes one and two. He's two fouled-off pitches into strike three for being nasty about the Mets.

But it's got something, it's got some verve and energy that I like, and it's set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I've had some ties for quite a while, so I'm as happy as the problems will let me be that I got this book as a gift.

The resolution to the death of Frankie's father is less a story of murder than of an unregrettable death. Ancillary violence is overplayed a bit to give things a noir feel. It works pretty well. The cop-world feels authentic, and the inhabitants of Ray's former life are like the cops I've known in the past. His schoolteaching life, mercifully, isn't a lot in evidence. The idea of it is enough to make the point that this isn't a man who takes the easy way through life.

Muscles reached into his pocket and took out two white pills. "Take these," he said.

"Ibuprofen?"

"Wintergreen. Every time you exhale, I get hit with a faceful of vodka. Where the hell'd you go last night?"

A snippet of smile-inducing chit-chat between Ray and his physical therapist, whose tender ministrations to Ray's badly damaged knees he spends the entire book avoiding. It's this sort of throwaway moment that marks a writer to watch. It's natural, it's funny, and it's well played for a smile when one's needed.

"The mayor has little interest in abandoned pools. Or abandoned people."

"You're preaching to the choir," I said.

"Do you know, when they decided to shut this pool down, when they decided they could spare no more resources for the maintenance and security? That same year the millionaires running this country announced massive tax cuts. The federal government paid billions of dollars to the arms builders to produce weapons they told us they hoped to never use. They even found enough money to help other countries buy weapons and train soldiers and contribute to the culture of death."

Sing it, soul brother! I testify! Speak the truth!

So yeah, I'll be picking up the next book in hopes that some of the apostrophized plurals and the whack-a-mole character vanishings and the like will be smoothed out. Because this is one promising debut and one interesting series character.

The Yankees shit's gotta go, though. Me and my voodoo dolly are at the ready, should it prove necessary. ( )

A police officer truned teacher investigates the disappearance of one of his students and gets inovovled in solving the reason for the murder of the boy's father. The relationship of the teacher and the boy is interesting, but the overall plot is not believable. ( )

I have to admit that I found the first half of the book to be rather slow-moving, but I persisted because of the good reviews I had read. In the second part of the book, the mystery deepened and I came to care very much about the characters. An ex-cop turned teacher in inner-city New York becomes concerned when a student he had been trying to help, a promising young ball-player, stops coming to school and is in danger of losing his scholarship. When the actual police don't seem to be doing enough to find the boy and his younger sister, the teacher, Ray Donne, tries to find them himself. Rebuffed by the detective in charge, and facing issues from his police career, he gets kidnapped by some vicious characters and warned away with threats to his own family. Of course, this makes him all the more determined, and he calls in favours from his police superintendent uncle, and also an ex-partner, and a strange and annoying guy (a cop wannabe) he knows from the police bar where he works part-time as a bartender. An excellent and exciting mystery, highly recommended. I am looking forward to the next one! ( )