After five long years in federal prison, Griff Burkett is a free man. But the disgraced Cowboys quarterback can never return to life as he knew it before he was caught cheating. In a place where football is practically a religion, Griff committed a cardinal sin, and no one is forgiving.

Foster Speakman, owner and CEO of SunSouth Airlines, and his wife, Laura, are a golden couple. Successful and wealthy, they lived a charmed life before fate cruelly intervened and denied them the one thing they wanted most -- a child. It's said that money can't buy everything. But it can buy a disgraced football player fresh out of prison and out of prospects.

The job Griff agrees to do for the Speakmans demands secrecy. But he soon finds himself once again in the spotlight of suspicion. An unsolved murder comes back to haunt him in the form of his nemesis, Stanley Rodarte, who has made Griff's destruction his life's mission. While safeguarding his new enterprise, Griff must also protect those around him, especially Laura Speakman, from Rodarte's ruthlessness. Griff stands to gain the highest payoff he could ever imagine, but cashing in on it will require him to forfeit his only chance for redemption...and love.

Griff is now playing a high-stakes game, and at the final whistle, one player will be dead.

Play Dirty is Sandra Brown's wildest ride yet, with hairpin turns of plot all along the way. The clock is ticking down on a fallen football star, who lost everything because of the way he played the game. Now his future -- his life -- hinges on one last play.

I claimed I'd never read another Sandra Brown book after 'Ricochet'. Once I'd forgotten the details of that one, I decided to give her another chance, mostly for the football tie-in.
The premise was interesting(and more than a little creepy), but, like most reviewers, I couldn't warm up to any of the characters. While Griff and Laura at least seemed plausible,as they did some searching of their less-than-perfect-souls, Foster and Rodarte seemed to have come straight out of one of the old prime-time soap operas to which this book has been compared. I had to stop several times and remind myself that Foster was supposed to be only slightly older than Griff...he just seemed TOO insane to have lost his mind only a short time before.
Meanwhile, Rodarte was such an over-the-top bad guy, it was hard to accept when he was revealed to actually be a police detective, even a 'cop gone bad'.
The 'surprise' fate of one of the suspects, revealed late in the story, was a huge cop-out...and the true nature of Griff's on-field transgression,in a final, supposedly-heartwarming scene with Griff and Coach, instead cheapens that whole part of an already cheap and tawdry story.
Brown's writing style seemed a bit 'herky-jerky', with the occasional use of flashbacks simply to elaborate on what we'd just read('Griff did this. Before he'd done this, he'd done that and the other, which led to this. Now, he did this again.')This technique wore thin after a few times, as did her inability to edit and pace herself(as seen in numerous drawn-out 'chase' scenes, a TV and movie plot device which almost never makes for good reading, and in the interminable 'boardroom' scenes, part of a subplot which is largely forgotten about a third of the way through the book, and then very briefly resolved near the end.)

There were some moments when the character development seemed to get somewhere, which earned this review an extra star, but the ending seemed a little too neat and tidy.
So, not a waste of time like 'Ricochet', but, like Griff, it falls short of 'championship' level.

I had a hard time getting into this book, but as the pages turned it got better and better. I will read more of Sandra Brown's books.

I think a lot of readers are going to be appalled by this novel. The hero, Griff, is flawed. I ended up liking him though he isn't a very ethical person. He cheated. And that's a no no in professional football. (i.e. Pete Rose!)

What he is asked to do in this novel is so far fetched and disgusting. I can't tell you but it's really immoral. However, in the process, he gets himself into this really scandelous affair. How I managed to like the heroine is beyond me but as the story unfolded, I was cheering for a happy conclusion and it's rather sweet. There's not simple happy ever after in life and SB choses a clever and interesting way to finish it that you smile at the end because Griff deserves something wonderful.

I enjoy Sandra's writing. I am a casual reader of novels only at night before falling asleep (usually 20 pages or less before zzzz!). Very seldom will I want to skip a TV program to read or stay up past my bedtime reading. This book has me doing both. It is light and reads quickly. I haven't finished it yet but I hate for it to end.

I've read most, if not all of Sandra Brown's books and this one was boring. It finally got interesting around the last 100 pages. I loaned it to a co-worker who felt the same way.