Split Decision

Frankie Ortega came to Gorham to rebuild a fighter’s ruined shoulder and to disappear for a while. Eighteen months ago she refused to sign a medical clearance she knew was a lie, and the promotion she worked for made sure she would never work a big card again. So when the offer came to run the sports medicine for a washed-up champion’s last comeback, in a gutted mill gym at the end of a mountain road, she took it. A body is a body, and reading them is the one thing no one can blackball out of her.

The most feared man in the sport, the one every headline calls a killer, turns out to be the most honest patient she has ever put her hands on. He tries to run her off the first night, and the second, and the trouble is that the more he growls, the more certain she is that the story the whole sport tells about him is wrong. Because Frankie reads bodies, and fight film, and the numbers on a weight-cut sheet, and the forgery in a clearance form. And the death they hung on Rourke four years ago does not match a clean fight. It matches a fixed one.

The man who arranged it is Desmond Vaughn, the beloved elder statesman who built the sport and owns Rourke’s title shot, and he has just worked out that the new woman in the corner is reading things she was never meant to see. They think Frankie is only the therapist with a notebook, and that she will get frightened and go home. They have no idea she has already found the pattern in the fixed fights, and that the thing that ends a man like Vaughn is not a bigger fighter. It is evidence any commission can check, laid in front of the people he lied to, and the nerve to make them look.

Split Decision is a standalone dark sports romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.