Under the Sunset Rim Book

Eh. That is how I feel about this first book in the Mickey Rawlings Mystery series. I really love Baseball and heard a podcast about this book so I thought I would give it a try. Probably won't try others. So what did I like? Well it is a first time mystery author and so that is a good thing. The time period of the book, 1912, and the the use of the early days of baseball as the basis of the book. And some of the research.
That also is bad, because some of the research is outdated and there is nothing that I dislike more than when an author uses real people as part of the plot and then changes their bio to fit the plot. Here the author had two different people murdered, a baseball player and a former player, back in 1912. Unfortunately those two individual were neither murdered nor died in real life at that time, as a matter of fact the player who was killed off actually continued playing baseball after 1912. See, that in itself turns me off. Either create a character or fit the book to actually portray the individual you are going to use in the plot. I do not know why the author did this, other than he felt that was the best way to write the book. The other issue is the actual character Mickey Rawlings, who is prone to being both hopeless in his bumbling into problems, as well as his thought process as to who was the killer. The author wants us to believe that Ty Cobb was a suspect according to Rawlings, then it was AL League President Ban Johnson. It just gets dumber and dumber. And by the end the actual solution is rushed and how he solves the mystery makes little sense. I was rushing to finish this book, not because it was a page-turner, but rather because I just wanted to get this over with! There are 5 more books in this series, and despite my love of old-time baseball and baseball players, I am just going to pass on any more.