Soho Crime
384 Pages
Sometimes when you watch a TV show like “House of Cards,” you hope that’s not really the way Washington works, but deep down, you know that’s exactly how ugly it really is. We all already know that college football is as crooked as it gets, but we ignore it in the name of good entertainment. Eli Cranor, using his experience as a player and coach, weaves a fictional tale in Mississippi Blue 42 that exposes the dirty underbelly of the monster that is college football.
Special Agent Rae Johnson has football in her blood. Her father is a college coach who has won multiple national championships. In her days before entering Quantico, she spent her time on the sidelines, an unpaid intern for her father. She could have been a coach in her own right, but female coaches will not fly in this old boys club. Instead she heads to the FBI. It’s because of her connections to the gridiron that her first case out of the academy is to help trace illicit money that seems to be flowing into a small program in Compton, Mississippi.
Just as she arrives and starts assisting on the current case, the star quarterback plunges from the roof of a local bar, landing on a bag of money. Is it clean money or a payoff? Did he fall, jump, or get pushed? Could it be connected to the initial investigation that she was called down to Mississippi for? This could be the case that makes her career. She goes undercover among the team and coaches to find out what’s going on. In the process, her innocence about the game is broken. It’s an underworld of backroom deals, bribes, and outright collusion behind the scenes. Which loyalty will win out? Will it be to her job with the FBI? Or will it be towards the game she loves and her father?
Eli Cranor played college football before playing professional ball in Sweden as a player coach. After his career ended, he moved back to the United States and coached high school football. He knows the game at every level. He takes that knowledge and writes a compelling thriller mystery around the game. It makes the reader wonder how true some of these events could be.
In a perfect world, the student athletes are there for the love of the game while they get a college education. Reality is much, much different. There is so much money in the college game that education isn’t even a part of the equation anymore. The college makes a lot of money on these games, far more than they’d make actually educating young adults. Any public university that pays their football coach millions of dollars in salary while turning away academic students because of a lack of tuition is full proof of that. And as online betting gets more and more involved, the issue only gets worse. It’s no longer about a game -- its about making money.
While fictional, Mississippi Blue 42 by Eli Cranor weaves a tale that echoes reality, at least in the mind of this reviewer. The circumstances as written by the author, seem like they could be pulled from the news. And the characters woven through the narrative are fully formed and could walk off the page with their genuine emotions and foibles. Rae especially seems to be a real person inhabiting the pages of this novel. Her moral dilemmas in pursuit of her case were real struggles. Sometimes, some of the coaches seem to be stereotypical dumb jocks who believe the world revolves around them, but is that actually far off from reality?
I thoroughly enjoyed Mississippi Blue 42 by Eli Cranor. There were points where I was angry at the system that exploits impressionable young men, but there were points that gave me hope. There are still good people out there, and Rae is one of the good ones. This book is engaging, and you will be able to glide through this one with relative ease, and be quite entertained.
Craig Bacon has no answers for the boondoggle that is the NCAA. By typing that, I hope I don’t mysteriously fall off the edge of a building that I’ve never been to.