Since I started writing book reviews for Baseball America three years ago I’ve seen all kinds of pitches. We get e-mails from Big Six promo folks and personal pleas from authors who have struck out on their own. In early 2010 I received an e-mail from a small publisher called Chin Music Press about a book called Home, Away in which a star baseball player walks away from a $42 million contract to be the father his troubled teen son needs.

I said bring it on, because I’m always looking for a good baseball novel. But I’ll admit I had my doubts. An interesting premise can still go horribly wrong in the execution. Several days later, the book arrived in the mail. I was in the middle of reading something else, but scanned through the first few pages just to see what I was dealing with. Within minutes I was hooked. I finished it in about three days. Maybe less. And that’s with a baby in the house, which made reading time tough to come by.

Since then I’ve beaten the drum at every opportunity for Jeff Gillenkirk’s debut novel. Turns out he grew up not far from where I live now in Upstate New York, though he’s long since headed off to more exciting locales, including NYC, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, where he lives now. We’ve become friendly, exchanging e-mails on a semi-regular basis. He was kind enough to blurb my forthcoming book. Yet, somehow, I missed the part where he wrote a second novel, called Pursuit of Darkness, until he mentioned it last week.

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