Continuing his series of bestselling baseball sagas, White Rock, B.C. writer W.P. Kinsella brings nomadic pitcher Joe McCoy to the role of protagonist. Romping from bed to bed, he flops through a career of eight wins and 23 losses, tries journalism without much success, kidnaps a diplomat’s baby, helps stick up a burger joint, and comes to terms with his life as his teenage sweetheart lies dying in hospital. In the end, he’s a swell, committed kind of guy, though not the sort you’d trust with two bucks on an errand for a carton of milk.

It’s a farfetched romp, but it’s a good read; McCoy really is a character, dreaming of the wild horses he wants to be (as a shrink would say), getting into bar fights and introducing ever more interesting characters for future novels. The baseball allegory (kidnap a baby, steal a base; win a game, win the girl) gets the story from one escape to the next folly. Great scrapes make for great stories and this is a brawl in the midst of one of the great circuses of the century.

What makes the book complex and more than just a comedy is time shifting as Kinsella goes from present to past and on to dreams of what might have been. The technique gives the story depth, brings motivation into view, and reveals McCoy’s character to be that of a man in fear of the world. Thus the struggle to break rules, his contempt for cleanliness, the law, and accountants.

Will they come? They ought to; If Wishes Were Horses has the elements of success: it’s a sports book, there’s lot of vividly described sex, the characters are interesting and, for Kinsella fans, it’s the next installment.