Point Spread

Martin Quinlan has owned the New England Colonials for sixty years, on one principle: do it right. So when a discreet warning reaches him - one of his players may be compromised - he doesn't call the league, and he doesn't call the press. He calls Bartholomew Aldridge.

Embedded inside the franchise under the dullest cover imaginable, Aldridge's small firm of investigators begins to read the season the way no fan ever could: in the markets, in the injury reports, in the plays that die quietly at exactly the right moment. What they find is not a corrupt player. It is an operation - patient, professional, and still running - with a purchased instrument on the field, an unwitting source in the front office, and money moving through rooms no subpoena has ever opened.
And the closer Aldridge gets to the top of it, the clearer the coldest truth becomes: the man he was hired to find was never on the field at all.
By the season's last Sunday, sixty-five thousand believers will stand for the anthem - and only a handful of people will know what's really at stake beneath it.

Point Spread is the sixth book in The Associates series and can be read as a standalone book.