Hank Baker is pushing fifty when he steps onto a ballfield for the first time in three decades. It all flashes back – lush grass, snappy fastballs, cheering parents, a chubby umpire. Then he sees the coach. The same coach who abused Hank as a child and left him broken.
Diamonds and Dirt is Hank’s story. It’s baseball and sex abuse, crappy parenting, manipulation, narcissism, addiction, prison, suicide. It’s baseball and love, devotion, joy, redemption, friendship. And revenge. Oh yeah, revenge.
Diamonds and Dirt is a novel. It’s fiction. It’s also timely, urgent, and 100% real.
It’s a bitter, hard-driving father, his youthful baseball promise destroyed by a combat bullet to the knee. It’s a wildly talented son who’s terrified of crossing his Old Man. It’s a sinister coach and his promises of big-league glory.
Diamonds and Dirt is a parent convinced he’s doing the right thing, a boy caught up in the shards of his father’s broken life, a coach who uses them both for his own twisted needs, and the ripples that thrash everyone in their path.
Diamonds and Dirt is a portrait of our love affair with games and kids, and the risks we take when we play in the dirt. It’s William Walker’s first novel. He needs a publisher. The sequel, Tenth Inning, shows in grim detail the suffering of adults who get molested as children.