Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) [Mass Market Paperback]

Laura Crum (Author)

Book Description

Series: Gail McCarthy Mysteries | Publication Date: December 1995

When veterinarian Gail McCarthy finds a horse trainer dead at the bottom of a gully, she finds no shortage of suspects among the hostile girlfriends, angry horse owners, and legendary rivals he left behind. Reprint. K. PW.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Half of cutting-horse trainer Casey Brooks's stock is down with colic. Veterinarian Gail McCarthy's suspicions of poison are confirmed by lab tests. Then Casey, asking questions on the cutting-horse circuit, is thrown by his horse and killed. Gail investigates on her own and soon finds out more about bitter rivalries in the horse world than she wanted to know. City slickers content to admire horses from afar may puzzle over such terms as "team roping" and "confirmation flaw," but they'll also learn that some horses like beer and that horse barns are best built of metal, since horses eat wood. Unfortunately, Crum is less authoritative in narrative groundwork and characterization. Casey's girlfriend is described variously as "a Barbie doll come to life" and "excessively pretty in a Goldilocks kind of way," while Gail's ruminations about casual sex and the specter of AIDS smack irritatingly of self-consciously responsible writing. Once Crum canters into the heart of her story, however, the plot races nicely to a satisfying finish.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (December 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312956746
• ISBN-13: 978-0312956745
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An intriguing debut, September 1, 2003

By 

Chrijeff (Scranton, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (Hardcover)

It's a pity that Crum's earlier books seem to be out of print; as with any mystery series, you're always best advised to begin at the beginning, which is this one, followed by Hoofprints. Amateur sleuths who are veterinarians are not unknown, and many literary sleuths interact with smaller animals like cats and dogs, but Crum has made horses the focus of her mystery, and in the process imparts a lot of information about them (though I question her assertion, or rather implication, that *all* horses eat wood; some do (they're called "cribbers"), but it's a habit of which they can be broken (if that weren't true, there would be few 19th-Century barns and stables still standing!)). She has clearly done her homework regarding horse-based eventing (cutting, endurance riding), and knows something of equines at work (her descriptions of cutting horses working cows verge on poetry). She also has a gift for humor--she had me giggling helplessly over her description of Lonny Peterson's kitten Gandalf. She's a bit slow getting started--it isn't till we're more than a third of the way through the book that the body is discovered and the detection actually gets under way--but once she does, the mystery unrolls with suitable red herrings, and the ultimate perpetrator isn't one I would have suspected. I'll be looking for further novels in this series.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, but not a show stopper, August 9, 2001

By 

A. Harper (Waller, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (Mass Market Paperback)

I had been tearing the local bookstores apart looking for a Laura Crum book, after reading a review of her latest in Western Horseman. After ordering a paperback copy of this book from Amazon, and reading it (a total of two hours) I have hope that Laura Crum may turn out some really good horse-related mysteries, but alas, this is not one of them. Don't get me wrong, at less than [price] it's decent entertainment, but nothing great. Parts were a little thin, characterizations were only so-so (my own favorite character was Blue, the grouchy old Australian Cattle dog) and when the murderer is finally revealed, I found myself thinking, who? Oh, yeah, that guy. There are no really stunning twists or revelations. However, the horse related details were accurate, and probably, if it hadn't been for the equestrian slant, this book would have been awful.

I do have hopes that the books will get better. I didn't like the first Carolyn Banks book I read, but now I love her little mysteries. I'll buy my next Laura Crum book in paperback, and we'll see how that one reads.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I'm sorry I cannot recommend this book, July 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (Mass Market Paperback)

Ms. Crum's clumsy and, in many places, below average writing style detracted from what could have been a decent first effort. While I did not expect this to be a piece of timeless literature, I was shocked at the elementary prose. Her editor at St. Martin's Paperbacks let her down. First he or she neglected to edit run-on sentences such as the following at page 15: "We had grown apart after my folks died and I'd changed from a typically rebellious teenager into a suddenly serious adult, but we'd never quite lost track of each other and when I returned to Santa Cruz to work for Jim Leonard I'd discovered Bret working as a horseshoer, and our friendship had sprung back up." Then the editor allowed ineffective word choices throughout the story. As but one instance, Ms. Crum seemed unable to describe color as anything but "blue," "green," "brown," or "blue-green."

The murder mystery plot, while slim, is generally entertaining. Ms. Crum's insertion of the budding romance for Gail McCarthy, the heroine/veterinarian/detective-wannabe, didn't fit and only made McCarthy into an Ally McBeal-like character. While it works on television, it doesn't in the story. McCarthy comes across as annoying, unsympathetic. In fact, the women characters in Cutter suffer from stereotypical, unflattering descriptions. They are one-dimensional. And why does Ms. Crum seem to go out of her way to portray all the blond women (that is, all the women in the book except for McCarthy) in such a negative light? The only reason I even note this is because Ms. Crum highlights, multiple times, the blond hair color of the other women characters.

Based on the other reviewers here, I am sure there are many readers out there who will vehemently disagree with my rating. In the end, I did give it one star because, from the author biography, acknowledgements, and Ms. Crum's comments on this website, Ms. Crum does seem to be a very nice lady - and she loves horses. I give Ms. Crum a lot of credit for starting, completing and successfully publishing a book. Good for her for having tried!