Book Review: The Last of the Seals by Greg Messel

Dad grabbed this book as soon as it came in and had it read in 3 days! Yup, it's a keeper!

Synopsis: Mystery, romance and baseball in 1957 San Francisco. Sam Slater is a lifetime minor league baseball player for the San Francisco Seals. The Seals have just one more season left as San Francisco is about to become a major league city. Sam has come to the end of his baseball career and is going to join the private detective agency of his best friend. When Sam's partner inadvertently sees something he shouldn't have, he is brutally murdered. Sam must go it alone and try to find out why. Along the way he is swept off of his feet by a beautiful, Elvis-obsessed TWA stewardess named Amelia Ryan. Sam and Amelia try to unravel the mystery together. On dark and foggy San Francisco nights, trouble is lurking just around the next corner.

Review:  Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. This delightfully written novel by Greg Messel has all these things and more. We find ourselves in 1957 San Francisco, following the life of Sam Slater. We will see him, a fictional minor league baseball player; have his life completely turned upside down. Sam loves, eats sleeps and thinks constantly about baseball. He is now facing the end of an era in San Francisco as the New York Giants move in and his beloved San Francisco Seals will move out. Sam and two of his best friends fought together in World War II and came back home to continue with their lives. His friend Jimmy runs a private detective agency and has asked Sam to come in as his partner. Sam’s friend Vince is a SFPD officer and the three of them are very close. 

Doing a routine surveillance Jimmy takes pictures and is murdered trying to deliver the pictures to his client. As baseball season winds down for his Seals, Sam is thrust into the Private Eye business to find out how his friend is killed and also begins looking for a missing daughter of a very rich and powerful man in San Francisco. Sam also meets a beautiful TWA Stewardess, Amelia Ryan, and together they get involved in these cases.  

Greg Messel is a wonderful author. His book is void of foul language and graphic actions by the characters. One would feel like we are indeed living again in 1957. This novel will keep you captivated in each and every word. When you start reading you will not want to put it down. You will find yourself wanting Sam and Amelia to get out of this big mess and bring to a close the sadness of losing a good friend and not being able to continue playing baseball. While reading this novel I felt I was right there with Sam and all of his friends and hated to see it come to an end. I will let you see how it ended, I think you will be surprised and enjoy reading it as much as I did.      

About the Author:  Greg grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and has had a newspaper career as a columnist, sportswriter and news editor. He won a Wyoming Press Association Award as a columnist while working for a daily newspaper in Wyoming. Greg also spent many years in the corporate world as a Financial Manager. He now devotes his energies to writing at his home in Edmonds, Washington on the Puget Sound just north of Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Carol. This is his fourth book.





Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book for review purposes on this blog, free of charge, from Pump Up the Volume Book Blog Tours. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it.