Most baseball fans know what links Fred Merkle, Fred Snodgrass, Mickey Owen and Bill Buckner. It's a pantheon of public failure. They would be harder put to say what links Eric Byrnes, Tony Fernandez, and Babe Ruth, though these players made misplays every bit as egregious. In this smart, highly readable history of scapegoating, John Billheimer identifies the elements that combine to condemn one player to a life sentence while another gets a wrist slap for the same offense. As it turns out, the difference between a lower-case e in some forgotten box score and a lifetime of ignominy can hinge...

Failure analyst Owen Allison returns to his native West Virginia, where his mother faces cancer and construction dumping threatens a family hollow. Owen's Aunt Lizzie, shotgun in hand, vows to stop the dump trucks. A trucker is killed and Aunt Lizzie swears she pulled the trigger. But Owen thinks she's hiding something. He sets out to find the truth, putting himself in the crosshairs of a deadly conspiracy, as his mother undergoes her own ordeal. This Mystery Company edition restores to print the third novel in the Owen Allison series.