A Crooked Football Player In Texas?
When I read Sandra Brown’s latest thriller, one question immediately popped into my head: how on earth has Griff Burkett, a star quarterback who threw a playoff game for the Dallas Cowboys, survived his five year stint in prison? After all, from what I know about Texas football (which, admittedly, comes from watching King of the Hill reruns), it would appear to me that a football player in Texas that throws a game should have been torn limb-from-limb long before he made it anywhere near the penal system, and he certainly should have perished within it. Especially since this game was one that would have lead the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. But I suspend my disbelief often when I read a thriller, and so I decided to keep going through Play Dirty.
Burkett, upon his release from prison, is trailed by a troll, Stanley Rodarte, who seems bent on ruining Burkett’s already miserable life. Meanwhile, Burkett, who has no job prospects, is approached by the paraplegic billionaire Foster Speakman, who offers Griff $600,000 to conceive a child with his wife, Laura. While this makes Griff’s stomach turn, causing him to call Foster “insane” on a number of occasions, he eventually agrees because he needs the money.
Things are moving along ok for Griff – aside from a run-in with some hooligans who beat him to a bloody pulp and his inability to shack up with his favorite prostitute, he at least has money in the bank and can look forward to his monthly trysts with Laura Speakman. Then, of course, things go from sort of wrong to horribly wrong, and Griff is left to track down the one man who can prove his innocence.
Brown looks like she had a good time writing this one, and that carries over onto the page. Burkett is pretty much a waste of a human being until you get to page 100 or so, but after that, he (and the rest of the book) get a lot livelier. My second biggest problem with this book was that, as a fan of this genre, it was a bit easy to figure out where it was all going (if not exactly how it ended up playing out), and so part of me finished reading it to prove that I was right rather than to find out what happened.
My biggest problem is, of course, the football player who cheated not at least leaving Texas. When I picked up the book, I was hoping that Burkett would be beaten senseless throughout. Perhaps I just watch too much football and have a bit too much bloodlust carrying over.
