A middling mystery, but a persuasive look inside professional horse racing.
After their first major success, a couple involved in horse racing encounter deadly foes in this mystery novel.
Black, the author of Mountain Justice (2013), effectively immerses the reader in the world of competitive horse racing in this work, and it’s a vivid setting for a book that combines sports and crime fiction. As the story opens, Black describes how FraziersFury, a thoroughbred horse, “pricked his ears, arched his neck, and with the slightest of bucks, danced his way onto the dirt oval” where the race begins. Additionally, the author offers detailed dialogue by the race announcer: “On the far outside, FraziersFury is gaining with every stride…Nordstrom has moved past BaskervillesBobby…FraziersFury is moving right with him.” Nordstrom, the losing horse, belongs to Angie McCoy, a wealthy trainer who enlists her lawyer, Nelson Dickenson, to purchase FraziersFury from the owners. When Natalie Frazier, a horse breeder and wife of trainer Jeff Frazier, turns down Nelson’s offer, someone tries to steal FraziersFury, but Santos Velasquez, the groom, chases them away. After the Fraziers’ horse defeats Nordstrom again, someone lures Natalie to a secluded area and kidnaps her; however, she escapes and hotwires a truck. After reuniting with Jeff, though, Natalie insists on watching FraziersFury race, bringing the focus back to racing. Overall, the novel is likely to thrill racing aficionados. However, mystery readers may wish that it had a tighter, more suspenseful plot. As it is, roughly 50 pages separate each crime, and the most important one—a murder of a major character—doesn’t come until the novel’s halfway point. The rest of the novel, though, focuses on who’s behind the killing and other criminal acts, such as cutting the brakes on a truck, which leads to one man’s hospitalization.
A middling mystery, but a persuasive look inside professional horse racing.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-975790-12-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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