Four-Finger Singer and His Late Wife, Kate

In the tradition of W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams) comes a darkly comic novel of life, love, death, and baseball. The only son of overachieving parents, Jake Singer goes from left-handed Little League legend to pro baseball prospect at Stanford. When a freak accident involving mob enforcers and a case of mistaken identity interrupts his budding career, he retreats to law school ("I'm not sure what's worse: having your index finger forcibly amputated by a mob goon or spending three years at Harvard Law School"). Years later in Cambridge, he meets Kate, lately arrived from Iowa, a perky twenty-year-old waitress with a secret past. An unlikely romance blossoms into an unlikely marriage--one quickly plagued by a parade of blunders and revelations. Haunted by her missteps and in the throes of leaving her husband, Kate suffers a catastrophic rendezvous with a runaway truck. While Jake finds solace in an improbable return to baseball, Kate transcends her sudden, tragic death, resolving to redeem herself posthumously, interceding in her widower's life in a well-intentioned but often hilarious campaign to ensure his success on the ball field and in the bedroom.