With the Yankees perched in first place in the AL East, it’s a great time to launch the paperback of The Babe Ruth Deception, my mystery about the Babe’s first years with the Yanks.  Consider pre-ordering your copy soonest!

Set in 1920 and 1921, The Babe Ruth Deception plunges Jamie Fraser and Speed Cook — the heroes of my mystery series — into the tumultuous time when the Babe was reinventing baseball, when gangsters corrupted America’s Pastime, and when Prohibition changed everything.  The story careens from pennant races to terrorism, from the movies to forbidden romance to fixing the 1919 World Series, while dark figures sink their hooks deep into the Babe. Only Fraser and Cook can help. . . . (For full synopsis, click here.)

Next month I’ll be talking about the book at these events and would love to see you there:

• Sunday, July 9, at 2 p.m., at the Bethesda, MD Writers Center
• Saturday, July 8, at 9 a.m., with the Bob Davids Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research in Columbia, MD.

Reviewers of the novel have been generous:

• “David O. Stewart is rapidly becoming one of our best new writers of historical mysteries . . . [with] his Deception series of gripping mysteries.”  “[Fraser and Cook] have plenty of fraught challenges, but none more engaging and human than the swaggering, generous, profligate Great Bambino.”

          — Washington Times, September 22, 2016

• “A terrific read. . . . This one is a baseball fan’s dream.”

          — Mystery Scene Magazine, Fall 2016

• “The Babe Ruth Deception is a solid story of friendship, love, and baseball set at a turning point in American history. It offers a glimpse of some of the worst of human nature — scandal, greed, racial tension — yet leaves the reader rooting for the home team.”

          — Washington Independent Review of Books, October 9, 2016

• “This is so much more than a baseball book. . . .  I loved it!”

— Tim Kurkjian, ESPN Baseball Contributor and Author