Third and Long

A dying midwest factory town is uplifted when a former Notre Dame football star is hired as the local plant manager. Soon he is offered not just the job of saving Made Right Clothing but the far more daunting task of saving the town. As it turns out, this may be the one challenge for which his checkered career has prepared him. Laced with keen insights into contemporary issues - the power of community, pitfalls of the global economy, the skewed importance of sports in the lives of people who desperately need a victory. Third and Long is a moving portrait of a vanishing America hanging by a thread, with perhaps just enough time remaining for one last miraculous play.

** Winner of the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Award for Popular Fiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association