Fadeaway

Ex-Red Sox center fielder Harvey Blissberg (Strike Three You're Dead is now a private eye in Cambridge. He's hired to find a missing Boston Celtics star and then, quickly, a missing Washington Bullets player. Both athletes have vanished from Boston's Logan Airport, the Celtic last seen in the company of ""a man with a beard.'' Blissberg can't find any connection between the players, and there are hints that drugs are behind the disappearances. Then the two bodies turn up in separate lockers in the Eastern terminal, both shot, but with different guns. Blissberg finds a very tenuous connection that takes him to Providence, where he uncovers the old, possible murder of a high-school basketball star that may involve a legendary college coach now running for the U.S. Senate. Background details of Providence and Cambridge are nicely conveyed, but readers may object that the final, crucial clue to the mystery isn't played fairly. And New Englanders may be dismayed by the sporadic, hence jarring, depiction of their accents. (September 30)