The Whirlwind is not a metaphor.

Whirlwind
by Alison Hart
Release Date: May 25, 2010
Sequel to Shadow Horse.

When thirteen-year-old Jas Schuler found her beloved mare, Whirlwind, dead in her paddock, she thought her heart would break. Now Jas knows the truth.

Whirlwind is alive.

Wealthy horse breeder Hugh Robicheaux faked the mare's death, collected insurance money on her life, then sold her to an unsuspecting buyer. And he's going to get away with his scheme, too. Unless someone can find Whirlwind. And that's exactly what Jas plans to do.

But hunting for Whirlwind is dangerous. Hugh has threatened to destroy everything Jas holds dear unless she stops her search. As she struggles with her desire to find Whirlwind without letting the people she loves get hurt, Jas must ask herself: Is all this worth risking for a horse she may never find?

I have heard repeatedly about the amazing Shadow Horse, Alison Hart's award nominated horsey mystery. For some reason, I never got around to reading it, even when I knew Whirlwind was right around the corner. After reading this, I'm making Shadow Horse a priority.

Because Whirlwind is pretty awesome.

Two months after the beginning of Shadow Horse, Jas is nearing the end of what is essentially court ordered house arrest. She's pretty obsessed with the idea that Whirlwind might still be alive, and so is the insurance company that Hugh Robicheaux has a history of scamming. Hugh, however, has no intention of being brought down, because people like him "always win." People like Jas have ankle monitors and live in mobile homes, like they're supposed to. Lucky for Jas, she's not about to accept anything that Hugh says, and uses just about every resource around her to marshal interest in finding Whirlwind.

Enter the insurance agency's investigator, M. Baylor. All of a sudden finding Whirlwind stops looking like a crapshoot and more of an actual possibility. Hugh knows it, too, and starts to threaten not only Jas, but Second Chance Farm. Hugh also knows more than he should, leading Jas to suspect there's a spy in their midst, but at a charity case rescue like Second Chance Farm, who could be feeding information to a man they all loathe?

There's illegal search and seizure, sexual tension, and murder.

There's even a hurricane.

It's awesome like that.

What I like about Whirlwind is that it's not just a horse book and it's not just a horse mystery. It's a young adult novel about a girl who's going through a lot, as well as trying to grow up. She's a barely fourteen-year-old kid taking care of her elderly grandfather, navigating a possible romance, and trying to take down the most influential man in town. It sounds like a lot for one girl and a rescue farm to tackle, but it's done with a gritty realism that had me immediately addicted.

Jas isn't a spoiled brat with horse ownership on the brain. She's human. She gets prickly and lashes out (usually at Chase, the boy she's in teenage love with, which never fails to amuse me), and she recognizes the need to apologize (usually to Chase, as it turns out) in order to remain a likable horse girl. And while she mostly lands in serious main character territory, she knows how to apply some humor into her life. She's also (dare I say it?) proactive. Nothing just randomly turns out in Jas's favor that she doesn't work hard for, something I think we can all appreciate.

Plus, she doesn't like Twilight. I mean, that alone is enough.

While this book does have a beautiful and satisfying ending, it leaves plenty of undeveloped plot for another sequel. I'll go ahead and say that I'm expecting this to be a second book in a trilogy. It may take another ten years to see it, but the potential is definitely there. In the meantime, Whirlwind is strong enough to stand on its own.

Overall: Totally worth your money. Go buy it.

A mystery that holds my attention.

Gargantuan
A Ruby Murphy Mystery
by Maggie Estep

Maggie Estep’s critically praised heroine, Ruby Murphy, is back! Back in Coney Island with a bunch of endearing misfits, back at the racetrack ogling thoroughbreds, and back learning that, on the seamy side of the sport of kings, survival can be a long shot.

Ruby’s life is nothing if not complicated: she’s spending a lot of her time worrying about a jockey named Attila Johnson; a good-hearted Teamster with a bad back; a neighbor who is suspicious of anything that moves; one very fat cat who craves raw meat; a missing FBI agent; an underused piano; a few fine horses—and the sure knowledge that somehow, somewhere, there is a killer among them.

It's been a while since I read this one, but what the hell.

The thing I like about these books is the single fact that they do show the seamy side of horse racing perfectly. You don't see the glitz and glamour in these books at all, which is a little refreshing and therefore odd in itself because probably 95% of horse racing is anti-glitz. So it's not the mystery or power hungry elite that drive these stories so much as the weirdness of all the everyman characters whether or not they're sitting alone in their apartments or interacting with others. They're quirky. In a cute and/or insane way.

From what I remember of the mystery, it involves a crazed animal lover. That's really all I'll say, because when "crazed animal lover" comes up, it's probably best that you just read it and find out for yourself.

Oh, and interestingly Jane Smiley's Justa Bob from Horse Heaven shows up.

Now I'm wondering if I should attempt Horse Heaven again.

Yeah, probably not.

I dislike horse racing mysteries, but here we are anyway.

Hugger Mugger
A Spenser Novel
by Robert B. Parker
2001

You may wonder where I was the past week, in which case I could not tell you. I was around, doing things, not even taking a horse related media break. I don't know. Couldn't tell ya.

Spenser is back and embroiled in a deceptively dangerous and multi-layered case: someone has been killing racehorses at stables across the south, and the Boston P.I. travels to Georgia to protect the two-year old destined to become the next Secretariat. When Spenser is approached by Walter Clive, president of the Three Fillies Stables, to find out who is threatening his horse Hugger Mugger, he can hardly say no: he's been doing pro bono work for so long his cupboards are just about bare. Disregarding the resentment of the local Georgia law enforcement, Spenser takes the case. Though Clive has hired a separate security firm, he wants someone with Spenser's experience to supervise the operation. Despite the veneer of civility, Spenser encounters tensions beneath the surface southern gentility. The case takes an even more deadly turn when the attacker claims a human victim, and Spenser must revise his impressions of the Three Fillies organization - and watch his own back as well.

Horse racing in Georgia, you say? I think all that needs to be said about the state of the Georgia Thoroughbred breeding and racing industry is that they're all excited about Together Forever getting an Eclipse Award. Together Forever, apparently, being bred in Kentucky by Georgians. Good on you, Georgia!

I got Hugger Mugger as an audio book, not having any idea what was in store for me. Joe Mantegna is the voice of our main character, Spenser, which instantly transforms him from macho Boston man to macho New Jersey gangster. Interestingly, he makes no attempt to replicate a Boston accent for this guy when he is all about trying for Southern accents with the other characters, and most of the Southern accents manage to transform every character into a coquettish 12-year-old girl who cannot stop asking questions.

Anyway, I really don't think this book really deserves a recap or a review, quite bluntly. It's a book in a string of Spenser books, of which I know none but, obviously, this one. Spenser is a P.I., who is hired by these people in Georgia, so he goes down there to investigate the horse shootings and predictably pisses off a couple of Southern men because he's an asshole. And the guy who hired him gets killed and the guy's daughter tells him to go home because obviously the police can handle this and Spenser is not wanted. Totally not telling! Totally.

Spenser goes home to Boston so he can help this random girl get back together with her abusive boyfriend. Nice way to be an enabler, Spenser! Well done.

Then this woman who calls herself a courtesan, but is basically just a whore, even though she expressly says she is not a whore, but come on, shows up in Boston to hire Spenser and send him back to Georgia so he can investigate the Three Fillies family and figure out who killed Walter Clive, because his courtesan/whore/mistress has a son by him and she was cut out of the will, suspiciously enough. Blah blah, things happen, people die, others are scarred for life, and it comes down to the revelation that Walter Clive's youngest daughter had him killed when she discovered that her dad was going to revise his will and place his illegitimate son as the sole heir of Three Fillies. So after this random shoot out with these people hired as security for Three Fillies, everyone is hauled down to the police station so they can figure everything out and have a nice, long chat. No one implicates the youngest daughter in the murder, but they know she did it, so the security guy takes the fall for the entire thing and rich, completely crazy daughter flounces out of the police station. Security guy mutters something about having screwed over women his entire life, and then bemoans that he finally had to pick a crazy one to fall in love with. Spenser is like "yeah, that's too bad." And the book ends abruptly, just like that.

• From this book, you could assume that all Southern women are whores or completely insane. Of Walter Clive's three daughters, two are nymphomaniacs and one is so celibate she forces her nympho sisters to "clean" themselves after daddy dies. By this I mean she shears off their hair and drugs them so they can do nothing but stare at a wall.

• Also, one of the nympho sisters married a pedophile. No one bothers to really point out the giant flaw that is this marriage's existence, but because she is so sexually frustrated by her husband's not being attracted to her, she decides to become an escort. Not only that, she decides to let the escort service "place" her at a truck stop so she can perform blow jobs for $30 each. I...do not understand any of this. Although I especially love the fact that everyone has this uncontrollable urge to sooth the pedophile's feelings.

• Hugger Mugger runs in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga. There is a detailed description of this race, wherein it reads like Hugger Mugger beat up a couple of horses on his way to the finish line. If you're going to run up and smack back and forth between two horses in the homestretch, you're going to get an inquiry and you're going to wind up disqualified.

I don't know. It was entertaining for taking up my commuting time. That's pretty much it.

I'm starting to wonder if any Thoroughbred's pedigree is correct at this point.

Ride a Dark Horse
A "Gusty" McCaw Mystery
by Lynn Hall
1987

"Gusty" McCaw has a life many teenage girls can only dream of. Living at Tradition Farm gives her independence and the chance to work with the horses she loves so much. But her happiness is shattered when her father is killed in an accident that looks very much like murder. Then Gusty discovers that another horse is being bred in place of Tradition's valuable prize stud, Ambassador, and she realizes that something suspicious -- and dangerous -- is going on at Tradition Farm. Which horse is being switched with Ambassador for breedings and why? And how does her father's shameful death fit into the puzzle?

Gusty is determined to uncover Tradition's dark secret, but someone is equally determined that Gusty never reveal her knowledge and will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to keep her quiet. Stripped of her good name, unable to trust anyone, Gusty must solve the mystery alone, using only her sharp wits and her courage.

I like Lynn Hall, mainly because I feel she creates interesting main characters that seem firmly grounded in reality rather than flitting off in some sentimental "OMG did you just call that horse an animal?" mentality. Ride a Dark Horse definitely exhibits one of these characters. Gusty McCaw was practically born and bred on a horse farm, and she has no special horses that only respond to her attention, or crazy love works miracles policy. What Gusty does share with most of her other horse book main characters is the determination factor, which comes in handy for her as she winds up trying to avoid bodily harm while attempting to get her life back.

The deal is that Gusty's dad is recently dead, and Gusty is all alone in the world except for her connections at Tradition Farm. She's sitting outside at night and sees lights on in the breeding shed. This is typical, as Ambassador usually does his breedings at night. While this is happening she follows her dog to the stud barn and sees Ambassador still in his stall, making a mystery out of what was going on in the breeding shed. Later she discovers that the owner's riding horse, a stallion named Toby, would look like Ambassador if he was less fat. Gusty, because she's new at this whole suspicion thing, asks the stud manager, Jackson, why Ambassador was in his stall when they were in the breeding shed, and before she knows it she's been fired for selling information to other farms.

Gusty makes the executive decision to get her job back, so she goes on the hunt for clues about this whole stallion switch thing. A day in a library leads her to a farm called Wood Hill, which had a few stallions before a fire put a stop to that. While there she manages to make a few enemies, a few friends, and then, because of the enemies, she's fired for not being straight about who she is when she presented herself for a job. By that point, she's been asking questions there also about this former Wood Hill stallion, American Express. It turns out that one of the grooms is the nephew of someone at Tradition, creating a link that Gusty can't ignore. The groom realizes this, and decides to beat up Gusty, who runs out of there afterward. By this point, she realizes that Toby and American Express are the same horse and they're using Toby as a stand in for Ambassador.

She calls up the Jockey Club in hysterics, but the guy on the phone doesn't exactly sound like he believes her, so she goes into more hysterics and heads to Tradition to find the proof she needs: a little white dot on Toby's eye. When she gets there, the groom from before knocks her out and hog ties her in the breeding shed, where he has a meeting with his partner in crime, a rider from Tradition called R.B. Then Jackson comes along and tells them that he's had enough of this and they can't just murder poor Gusty. The boys don't like this, and all hell breaks loose just as the cops get there and the Jockey Club guy, Theo, takes Gusty to the hospital.

So, these stud switch plots never seem to have a realistic reason behind them, and I was interested to see how Lynn Hall explains this whole thing. The explanation? LOVE. Jackson was in love with the owner lady, who bought Ambassador after her husband died, only to have the stallion be a dud. Jackson loved her from afar to the point that he decided that they needed to switch out Ambassador for a stud more likely to be fantastic, but not too fantastic. Unfortunately, the stud they stole was way fantastic and everyone started to blackmail eachother to the point that, when Gusty's dad was transferred to the stud barn, R.B. had to spike his soda with vodka in attempts to get him to go along with the plot. Her dad was an alcoholic, so they hoped he'd just be too drunk to deal with anything and eventually would get fired. Only he fell over and died. Oops.

Tradition Farm folds, the appropriate parties go to jail, and Gusty is offered a job with the Jockey Club as an undercover agent of sorts. Gusty decides to take the job because she's (shockingly...like, I turned my head and squinted at this) got a huge crush on Theo, who is, like, forty. I was completely disturbed by this revelation, and then the book quickly ended, leaving me feeling a little uncomfortable.

But, you know, I still like Lynn Hall.

Hex: a mystery book rec

Hex
A Ruby Murphy Mystery
by Maggie Estep
Published: 2003

Like I said back when we covered The Alibi Man, I'm not one for mysteries or cop drama. But I bought this book and its sequel years ago. Go figure. Maggie Estep isn't exactly your typical mystery/thriller writer, so Hex has that going for it. However, it is, for all intents and purposes, essentially a first novel. So it's got that going against it. Let's take a look at the summary.

Having drifted through thirty-three years of life, Ruby Murphy has put down roots in a rootless place: Coney Island. A recovering alcoholic who is fanatical in her love for animals and her misanthropic friends, Ruby lives above a furniture store and works at the musty Coney Island Museum. One day, Ruby is on the subway heading into Manhattan when the train stalls between stations. An elegant blond woman with a scarred face strikes up a conversation, and a misunderstanding between the two women leads to an offer Ruby decides she can't refuse. The woman needs her boyfriend followed, and she thinks Ruby is the woman to do it -- and do it right.

Ruby's life has been flat and painful lately. The Coney Island Museum isn't doing much business, Ruby's live-in boyfriend has moved out, and her best friend Oliver is battling cancer. Ruby agrees to follow the woman's boyfriend, Frank, a man who works at Belmont Racetrack and seems to hang out in odd places with bad company. Ruby soon finds herself pushed headfirst into horse racing's seamy underbelly. This is a dangerous world where nothing is as it appears, and people and horses seem to have limited life spans. When Ruby finds herself staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, she beings to have second thoughts.

Only now it's far too late.

What's good about this story is it's mainly populated by a bunch of quirky characters, and Ruby is not at all a Mary Sue turned hard ass. She's mostly just an eccentric, who loves Coney Island, horses, and the piano. The book is told entirely in the first person, but it switches viewpoints between Ruby and other characters: her piano teacher, her friend with cancer, a groom at Belmont, an assistant trainer at Belmont, and Ruby's neighbor. So it's attempting to give you strings of the main plot through people who don't necessarily know what the hell is going on. The good thing about this is it saves Ruby from being a complete author insert, but it slows the whole thing down until the most interesting stuff happens in the last four chapters. You'll find yourself skimming through some of the extraneous crap, because try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to care that much about Ruby's neighbor's girlfriend's bad breast implants, which take up more of the book than I remembered.

Anyway, the book opens up with Ruby on her way to her piano lesson. The train is stuck on the tracks, and to pass the time a blond woman strikes up a conversation with a less than willing Ruby. To be a jerk, Ruby tells the woman she's a private investigator and wow, what a shock, this woman desperately needs a private investigator. Try as she might, Ruby cannot escape the woman's desperate pleas for help, even after Ruby levels with her that she is not anything remotely resembling a private investigator. This doesn't not dampen the woman's spirits, and before you know it Ruby is hired to follow around Frank, a possibly cheating boyfriend.

Is Frank cheating? Really, no one really needs a private investigator to figure this out. Ruby is of this mindset the entire time, so I appreciate that. Of course Frank is cheating. Frank is also a groom at Belmont, so in order to get Ruby closer to the action, the woman (Ariel, who has spent all her money on developing a hybrid orchid and is not at all mentally well) pulls strings and gets Ruby a job as a hotwalker for a trainer at Belmont. This should be your first tip that things aren't right with Ariel, but it's so subtle you'd never really see it until later. Ruby meets Ned, assistant trainer, and they begin dating eventually, but things turn horribly wrong when Ruby begins to suspect him of suspicious behavior after someone Frank was carrying on with dies at the track. Mainly this involves her seeing him with a gun after they've had sex. Ruby reacts badly. Things spiral out of control from there, revealing Ariel's real motives and Ned's real identity. The FBI come along, and things end with Ned (or Edward, as he is actually known) patching things up with Ruby, Ned calling in favors to find a crazy Russian woman who stole his kitten, and Ruby going on a wild ride on an ex-race horse.

Anyway, I'm not going too in depth on this one because that would ruin the suspense. It's a good book, although it gets stuck in places with characters that aren't exactly relevent to the plot. I think this is rectified in the sequel. The racetrack scenes are fantastic in this book, so that's mainly why I'm reccing it. And it's not totally ridiculous, and I like FBI agents. So, consider this recced.

This is a trilogy, Gargantuan and Flamethrower following Hex. Maggie Estep has another horse racing book coming out in May called Alice Fantastic.

If women scorned are frightening, are lesbians scarier than the Russian mob? Let's find out!

The Alibi Man
by Tami Hoag
Published: 2007

Kelsey requested The Alibi Man, and here I am, aiming to please.

She was a vision. She was a siren. She was a nightmare. She was dead. Now he needed her to disappear. And he knew just how to make it happen. The Palm Beach elite go to great lengths to protect their own—and their own no longer includes Elena Estes. Once upon a time a child of wealth and privilege, Elena turned her back on that life. Betrayed and disillusioned by those closest to her, she chose the life of an undercover cop, the hunt for justice her own personal passion. Then a tragic, haunting mistake ended her career. Now Elena exists on the fringes of her old life, training horses for a living. But a shocking event is about to draw her back into the painful vortex she’s fought so hard to leave behind.

First she finds the body—a young woman used, murdered, and dumped in a canal. Not just a victim, but a friend. As Elena delves into her dead friend’s secret life, she discovers ties not only to the Russian mob but also to a group of powerful and wealthy Palm Beach bad boys known for giving each other alibis to cover a multitude of sins. A group that includes a man Elena once knew very well—her former fiancé, Bennett Walker, a man she knows has already escaped justice at least once in his life.

Finding her friend’s killer will put Elena at odds with her old life, with her new lover, and with herself. But she is determined to reveal the truth—a truth that will shock Palm Beach society to its core, and could very well get her killed.

I should say I'm not a cop drama person. Or a mystery person. This means, of course, that I will never review a Dick Francis book for this blog unless, you know, someone desperately wants me too and then, be assured, I will keep putting it off until I inevitably forget someone requested it. So please, just don't bother. Anyway, cop dramas. I don't watch them. I don't read them. Yet I am all about FBI drama, for some reason. Give me a disgruntled FBI agent and I am there with bells on. Because where a disgruntled FBI agent is, wackiness invariably ensues. Right? Naturally. I didn't watch all of those years of The X-Files and learn nothing.

So, The Alibi Man is a sequel to some book called Dark Horse. The events of Dark Horse are mentioned repeatedly, but are not important to this story so I will ignore them for this review. I have no idea where Dark Horse takes place in the timeline here, but it happened and people remember it and so forth. What we need to know is that Elena is our main character. She tells her portion of the story in the first person, so we can feel her angst and childhood trauma repeatedly. Elena is adopted (trauma ensues) by a rich family (more trauma) that never knew how to love her properly/blamed her for reminding them they weren't fertile (more trauma) before her fiancé raped someone and asked her for an alibi (more trauma) and she said no. Then her father, a defense attorney, gets her fiancé off even when she takes the stand against him (more trauma) and of course leads to her walking out of everyone's lives forever and ever. More trauma. THEN she becomes a cop, is promoted to detective, accidentally gets someone killed, is randomly dragged behind a car, and quits that career to move on as a horse trainer for her BFF gay friend named Sean. However, she does not appear to actually be training any horses during this book. That isn't traumatic enough for Elena, because mainly she's busy angsting about how traumatic her life is while trying to save humanity from the evil clutches of the elite and her father.

So, that's Elena. She's a boatload of fun, you see? I much preferred Detective Landry, who also gets some of the spotlight in this story in the form of third person, making this book a grab bag of conflicting personalities. Landry is Elena's sort of ex-boyfriend, in that they had sex a lot and then she dumped him when he wanted to have an actual relationship. Elena is no good at actual relationships, and Landry is way too good for her, so it works out. Only Landry doesn't know this yet. Eventually, I blatantly admitted to myself that I kept reading this book for Landry's portions of the story, because he's just hilarious in a bad ass detective way. For instance:

Weiss: "Where've you been?"
Landry: "Why? You want me to go back out so you can have a moment of privacy to whack off with a dead girl's underwear?"
Weiss: "Fuck you, Landry."
Landry: "Fuck yourself."
Weiss: "You were with Estes. Was she giving you a blowjob or what?"
Landry: "She was giving me information, dickhead. About the vic's movements Saturday night."

And this conversation would have kept going had a "relative" of the victim not called the apartment they were standing in, giving Landry the opportunity to talk to a crazed Russian who's going through the stages of grief as only a Russian can while basically not caring about anyone's emotions. It was a good move on Tami's part to break into Elena's angstfest with Landry, because I think it's obvious by now that I would have dropped this book halfway through if someone hadn't taken over the story from Elena occasionally.

Anyway, let's get to the actual story now. Elena's coworker, Irena, died and her body was dumped in the swamp in Florida. Elena, being the main character, finds the body while she's off riding one of Sean's expensive horses that seem to do nothing but eat and act bored. She calls Landry and he comes out there just in time to completely empty his firearm into an alligator that attacks the body. Although that doesn't quite do the job, so one of his officers runs up with a shotgun and that more or less does the trick. Anyway, angst angst angst for Elena. Get the hell out of my crime scene from Landry. Elena runs off and starts to snoop through Irena's apartment, and Landry knows full well she's doing this, but doesn't outwardly care. So Elena is off channeling all her cop rage into finding whoever killed Irena, angsting the whole time. It becomes apparent that Irena likes nice things, and Tami takes some time here to name drop about five designer names. Everyone's all, whoa, for a groom she's got a lot of Dior sunglasses. It must be the Russian mob! Or maybe it's just all the wealthy people around here. Or something. So Elena snoops, finds out about this girl named Lisbeth that works for this Brody person, and runs over there to traumatize someone else. She completely accomplishes this, and Lisbeth, who is from "Bumfuck, Michigan" starts her downward spiral.

Meanwhile Landry talks with some Russian guy who claims to be Irena's uncle, but is in fact Alexi, Florida's most ruthless mobster. Eventually, Alexi finds Elena, because she's the main character, and tells her that she's going to find the killer of his beloved Irena, who appeared not care about him, so I guess this is the fall out of his obsession. Whatever. Eventually Alexi totally loses it in a morgue after Landry shows him Irena's dead body, falls to the ground sobbing as Landry basically rolls his eyes and probably wishes he could pistol whip the stupid guy in the face. So that's Alexi.

Eventually we get into this Alibi Club, a group of men that cover their asses whenever someone gets a little too involved with a prostitute or cocaine or possibly murder. One of these guys is Bennett Walker, Elena's rapist ex-fiancé and another is Juan Barbaro, a nice polo player who is in the club but has some semblance of morals. Barbaro and Elena sort of hit it off, but she's all accusatory when he finally tells her the real story and that goes no where fast. Essentially, the real story is that Irena goes to this club for Brody's birthday, goes to an after party with the whole Alibi Club, gives every one of them a blowjob and basically partakes in what I suppose is a giant orgy. Barbaro wasn't present for the blowjobs and orgy, but he did see Lisbeth walking around outside the house. Dun dun DUN! Shocking! No one pays attention to this until the very end, however. Because everyone suspects Bennett Walker of being the asshole, and he is an asshole, and he was the one who dumped Irena's body because he randomly found her dead in his house. Alexi somehow becomes convinced without Elena's help that Bennett did the killing, shoves him in the trunk of a car, drives them both out to a warehouse, tortures Bennett for a while, gives Elena the opportunity to castrate him while unwittingly handing her a weapon that she uses against him, and he gets shot several times by the police who just happen to show up at the perfect time. Only while Alexi is busy totally losing it, he shoots Bennett in the head, killing him. So that's that.

Moving on to Lisbeth, she almost gets her ass handed to her by Bennett for "talking too much" because about halfway through the book Bennett genuinely believes he killed Irena and just can't remember, starting his downward spiral to the point where he kills a valet kid who's blackmailing him, right before Alexi shoves him in a trunk. Bennett tries to drown her in the swamp, but somehow does not succeed. So Elena finds Lisbeth while she's snooping around Lisbeth's apartment (she does a lot of breaking and entering, feeling justified the whole time), discovers her shaking and covered in mud and whatever else, and insists Lisbeth go to the hospital. Lisbeth doesn't want to go, but screw that. She's going. So Elena traumatizes her some more by grabbing her hair, yanking her to a car by her hair, and then backhanding anyone who gets in her way. Seriously. Then she traumatizes her some more by barking questions at her about Irena. Elena needs to be gaged and abandoned in a coal mine or something equally effective. She's not impressive, and I don't care how many daddy issues she has (which everyone knows about because she's constantly telling everyone how much her dad sucks). It turns out that Lisbeth is a lesbian (but not, because no one from Michigan would ever be a lesbian because they're raised all wholesome in Michigan) and was in love with Irena and Irena I suppose decided to have lesbian sex with her at some point or another, totally confusing things, and then when Irena got pregnant with Bennett Walker's kid (she assumes, anyway), she decides she's going to tell Bennett after this orgy and he'll divorce his crazy wife, marry her, and Lisbeth will be out in the cold. Or maybe Irena and Lisbeth can continue their thing and Bennett would watch, or something. While Irena is pregnant. Like...that's totally not going to fly for someone raised in Michigan. Lisbeth follows Irena to the after party, watches the orgy from a window, gets completely upset and then kills Irena when she comes out to have a cigarette, choking her with a leather necklace while she whispers "I loved you!" Yes, you've probably seen some version of this story before. We all have.

SO. Then Lisbeth can't take it anymore, walks out to where Bennett dumped Irena's body, although I frankly don't think she'd exactly know where the body was found, gets naked, slits her wrists, and wanders out into the swamp so the alligators can come kill her. Nice suicide, Lisbeth. Landry and Elena find her, but because Landry is awesome and Elena is insane, she breaks down into tears before she even finds the body, leaving the actual work to Landry.

Then Elena turns down offers to make her story into a TV movie, sort of might consider getting back together with Landry, and watches the sunset. The freaking end.

• It occurred to me as I finished the book somewhere over Illinois, that Elena is almost exactly like Anita Blake the Vampire Hunter. You know how annoying that woman is? Just put another twenty years on Anita, give her a couple of morals, subtract the harem of long haired possibly gay, but straight for Anita men, and you've got Elena. This disturbed me, and makes me wish the whole snappy mary sue trend in these sort of books would end relatively soon. These people aren't sexy or interesting. They are self absorbed and have enough issues to justify serious psychiatric help.

• This book takes place in the world of polo. So, you know, there was polo in this book. Elena is described as a horse trainer, but I think she's more of a groom because she's sure as hell not really doing anything else besides feeding horses and trying to solve crime.

• And Landry is awesome. This book would have been better if it had all been in the third person, and if Landry had been the main character. At one point he shoots vodka, beats up a giant Russian guy, totally loses it, threatens a whole bar with a gun, throws up, completely turns on a woman, rejects the turned on woman, and gets what he set out to do. All in that order, in a matter of three pages.
  

If Landry is involved in Dark Horse, I'll read it. If he isn't, well, I don't think it's really necessary.