Mississippi Blue 42

Edgar-winning author Eli Cranor throws a glorious Hail Mary in this series debut starring an FBI agent whose very first case lands her in a college football empire in Mississippi--where not everything goes according to the playbooks.

Compson, Mississippi, 2014: Newly-minted FBI Special Agent Rae Johnson knows a thing or two about the gridiron. She practically grew up on the football field, alongside her father, a legendary national-championship-winning college coach. Which is why she’s perfect for her first assignment out of Quantico: to investigate illicit money flows in a booming football town in central Mississippi. White-collar crime.

Rae brings fresh knowledge to the sting, but her mission to bust the so-called bagmen--diehard fans who effect recruiting decisions and game outcomes through under-the-table cash bonuses to players--has been unsuccessful. Things get complicated when the star quarterback of the University of Central Mississippi team falls off a roof to his death, a money-filled gym bag beside him. Rae isn’t there to investigate murder, it’s not in her jurisdiction--but try as she may to push it away, something’s going on in Compson, Mississippi. Something not quite right.

To get to the bottom of it, Rae must ingratiate herself with the people of Compson--the players, and gridiron girls, and coaches, and politicians, who comprise the complex social machinery of the small-town football empire. A heart-pounding noir thriller, Edgar-winning author Eli Cranor’s latest is an ambitious and well-researched dive into the crooked corners, the tenuous alliances, andthe power-hungry sideliners of America’s most popular game.

Eli Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle, a reservoir of the Arkansas River nestled in the heart of True Grit country. His work has won The Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Literary Prize and been featured in Missouri Review, Oxford American, Ellery Queen, The Strand and others. Eli also pens a weekly column, ＂Where I’m Writing From＂ for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his craft column, ＂Shop Talk,＂ appears monthly at CrimeReads. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest.