Drugs, alcohol, murder, and baseball - no, it's not the latest major leaguer press conference - it's Rick Wilber's latest thriller, Rum Point. Set on both the gulf coast of Florida and the Cayman Islands, Rum Point mixes a modern mystery thriller with a baseball narrative. Felicity Lindsay, a small-town police officer finds a battered murder victim on the beach. Her curiosity about the crime eventually leads Felicity and her father, Stu Lindsay, the alcoholic manager of the local major-league baseball team, into a deadly confrontation with a drug cartel.
"I didn't necessarily start to write a thriller, but as the story progressed I realized that it very much was one and I enjoyed that little bit of self-discovery. The various conflicts in the novel really keep things moving, I hope, and the reader comes to realize there are both internal and external struggles for all the characters in the story. I wanted a daughter in peril and a father who must change his own life in order to save hers. But I wanted her to be very strong, and throughout the novel she thinks (quite rightly) that she's saving him. I had a lot of fun playing with that mix of perspectives.
The greatest thing, for me, about the thriller genre is that at its best it combines a great sense of urgency with a literate, character-driven diction. We get to know one or two characters very, very well and we go along for the ride as those characters face conflicts that threaten their lives and the lives of others. Almost always, these characters struggle with their inner demons at the same time, knowing they must win the inner battle to succeed in the outward battle. I really enjoy reading that kind of storytelling, and I found I really enjoy writing it, as well. Rum Point is as good a page-turner for the readers, I hope, as it was for me as the writer."
But you still might be wondering - why baseball? Well, baseball and writing about baseball comes naturally to Rick.
"I grew up in baseball. In my youth we lived in Boston when Dad was a catcher and pinch-hitter for the Red Sox, and then in Chicago where he was a coach for the White Sox, and then in a string of minor-league towns where he was a Triple-A manager (Charleston, WV and Louisville, most memorably). So I grew up playing catch with the likes of Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, and going to Ted Williams' house for dinner, and hanging out with the children of the other players and coaches. I didn't know it, but it was a very privileged childhood.
I played other sports, as well, from college football and basketball to serious amateur soccer; but baseball is the sport I know best, and deepest, so it crops up in my writing all the time. I'm a parent, and like most dads I deeply love my son. But I definitely dote on my daughter. I'd do anything for her, including breaking my own neck to make her's safer. So I wondered what would happen if a lifelong baseball guy ... faced a point in life where he had to choose between the demands of the game and the needs of his daughter? The answer to that question is at the heart of Rum Point."
When you think of baseball in the Caribbean you think of Cuba and Dominican Republic - not the Cayman Islands. Setting has always played a large part in Rick's work on a much deeper level than just a place for the action - and it does again here in Rum Point.
"My previous thriller, The Cold Road, was set mostly in Mankato and in the island of St. Kitts. In that book I had a real metaphoric focus on deep cold, both the kind of sub-zero cold that changes everything about the way life for the people who live in it, to the emotional cold of my villain. There's a scene in that book where there's a frozen lake, and a body, and....well, you'll have to read it...
In the case of Rum Point, I wanted to put a similar metaphoric focus on the story and its characters, only this time on heat. So I set it in St. Pete, with its really impressive summer heat and thunderstorms, and tried to reflect that heat in several ways in the novel, including the deep, hot greed of the two villains.
I used the Caymans for about half the setting because it doesn't have a baseball tradition and I wanted to move the reader away from any baseball metaphors and into a more traditional thriller setting, complete with an impaling or two, an impressive water spout, a place called Hell, and a James Bondesque underwater battle to the death. Great fun."
Mark Combes is an avid sailor and Scuba diver and travels extensively in the Caribbean pursuing his passions. He works in book publishing and RUNNING WRECKED is his first novel.
