Just ‘Hello, there’s a kid here for you.’ Tag moves into her condo, and begins life on the road with Sam and the team, learning from a tutor and trying to figure out what to do now that he’s not wanted by his mother or father. Tag’s father is checking into rehab, and sends Tag to Sam without warning or even explanation. And since it’s baseball, they run home a lot.Īnother example is Tag, Sam’s nephew. There is still “home” and problems that come with it every time they return. They escape their lives temporarily, much like they do when they travel for away games. It’s not as if they escape into a wedding weekend and everything works out when they return home. Or it could have been a long, But no: Wade and Sam deal with their past, and their fradulent-but-sort-of-not-really present relationship and then move on from that weekend to reenter their lives. Shalvis could have stopped there, or kept most of the book set at that weekend wedding, or made the wedding a week long extravaganza of sexual tension. There’s a series of examples of how she could have left something before drawing it out, and each time she takes the extra step (and another and another) to make the character, the situation, the plot into something more powerful, more important, just more.įor starters, the book begins with Sam and Wade going to the weekend wedding away,sharing a hotel suite, and pretending for the public to be a couple. It would have been familiar, though lame. So many times Shalvis sets up what could be a cliched tension or character, and she could have stopped there.

Their fake relationship begins at a wedding Wade is in, and being in close proximity forces them to confront a moment in their past that both Sam and Wade have been trying to forget. Wade O’Riley is the catcher, both in the sense that he crouches behind home plate and grabs 90-mph fastballs, and in the sense that women throw themselves at him.ĮTA: Forgot a paragraph – oops! When a crazy fan fakes a pregnancy and claims the baby is Wade’s, a decision is made to have Sam and Wade pair off for awhile in the public eye to take the negative attention off of him and to give him a person in his life that will keep both crazy fangirl and other potential crazy fangirls away.

Samantha McNead is the PR director for the Pacific Heat, a major league baseball team in California.

Double Play by Jill Shalvis