Alex Wrangler is the current number one tennis player in the world. The son of a coal miner, he was raised to be driven and unyielding. This serves him well on the court but he also looks for advantages off the court as well, underhanded psychological tactics to damage his opponents' concentration.

Fletch Sampson is an up and coming potential new star from Australia, a naive kid with a lot of talent and a lot of training. He doesn't know any of the tricks, not yet.

We learn about where these two came from as we follow where they're going. In some ways it parallels Star Wars, but with tennis rackets instead of lightsabers.

One of these two will be drawn toward a soul-destroying malice and the other toward a redemptive spiritual rebirth.

The characters in their orbit, such as Wrangler's mother, Juanita, and girlfriend, Anita, Sampson's first love, Gail, who's also a tennis player, fellow pro and coach Jake, are all interesting and well drawn, as are the various tennis players who drift on and off the page.

Real-life pros like Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe and several others are mentioned but remain unseen.

This was really entertaining and the suspense at the huge grudge match at the climax was almost unbearable.

Sudden Death was Brennan's first novel and he went on to write Razorback, better known as a movie with the same name. Then he got into television and created the programs Judge Judy and A Current Affair.

All the tennis stuff in the book seems exactly right, and it seems incredibly likely that Brennan must have been an active player.

The first line is "Frank Norris was in the broadcast booth".