#Spotlight #Giveaway #Excerpt: 'Offside' by William P. Barrett
In 2006, amid the great real estate
bubble, Rick Hermannik, an adult referee of youth soccer, is found murdered in
a ritzy Los Angeles suburb, his whistle left in an unnatural place. Suspicion
quickly falls upon volunteer coach Diego Diaz, a one-time gang member whose hot
Latino rant over an offside call pops up on YouTube. The media eagerly pursue
the delicious story line of out-of-control soccer parents. Case closed–until
the boyfriend of Diaz’s grown daughter, Hector Rivera, a former high school
soccer star but now a college dropout in a dead-end job, tries to figure out
the truth, and himself.
Links to where book
is sold
Chronicling a wide cross-section of the humancondition, William P. Barrett has worked as an award-winning journalist across
the country and abroad for major newspapers and national magazines dating back
more than four decades. At various times he’s been a police reporter, court
reporter, local government reporter, feature writer, foreign correspondent,
national correspondent writing about very small places with very big problems,
investigative reporter and business reporter. Barrett’s longest stretch was at Forbes,
where his writings illuminated dark sections of the financial world and sent
miscreants to prison. A New Jersey native, Barrett holds two degrees from
Rutgers, one in law, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst charter holder. On
the weekends he has refereed youth soccer in the West, including Southern
California, for 17 years. Barrett now lives in Seattle. This is his debut
novel.
Links to social media
sites for the author
Like so many of his days, the calls carried him past notable landmarks of the region. The house on North Bundy Drive in LA's swank Brentwood section that, in 1961, a between-jobs Richard Nixon saved from yet another local wildfire by using his water hose, declaring, "I have seen trouble all over the world, but nothing like this.” The Hollywood Freeway through Cahuenga Pass, site of inconclusive 19th-century battles for the same political-instability reason that Mexico had to appoint 22 governors of California in its 26 years of control. The main campus of the University of Southern California, whose second president, Joseph Pomeroy Widney, later wrote an outrageously racist—and best-selling—book entitled Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, which predicted Los Angeles would become the center of white supremacy. The USC library contained more copies of that book than, say, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
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