When a quarter-million-dollar show horse and a top trainer are found brutally murdered side by side, Natalie Gold, a reporter for the Charlotte Commercial Appeal, seizes the chance to get out of the fashion beat she so detests. Though Henry Goode is the paper's star investigative reporter, it's Nattie who knows the rich, competitive, and devious world of the show horse circuit. After all, she scrimped and saved to buy her own hunter, Brenda Starr. In Horse of a Different Killer, Jody Jaffe, herself a former journalist and an enthusiastic equestrienne, takes off on a dazzling new career as a first-class mystery writer.
Moving between the emerald green paddocks of the Southern gentry and the raunchy newsroom of Charlotte's bustling daily, Nattie (a Yankee from Philadelphia) has gotten a crash course in the manners and morals of old Carolina society. She's discovered the dirty little secrets of families who mingle with the super-rich but are not above partaking in dark, shameful scams. She knows that Wally Hempstead, the stiff in the stable, was not only a talented trainer, but also an A-one cheat, skilled in blackmail and extortion. And she knows at least a dozen people who wanted to see Wally very dead, including her best friend Gail. The question is--which one of them actually did it?
Teamed with Henry and watched over by Detective Odom, who stars in her dreams, Nattie makes the rounds of the Carolina show horse circuit, pumping society matrons for scandals, tracking down trainers and braiders, chatting up the slim, blond girls who paid Wally Hempstead major bucks to make them winners.
But as she closes in on the truth, Nattie becomes the target for a series of increasingly savage death threats, not only to herself, but to her beloved horse, Brenda Starr....
As sleek and stylish as a thoroughbred, Horse of a Different Killer races to a climax that will leave readers gasping in surprise. Dick Francis and Bill Shoemaker, step aside. With Horse of a Different Killer, Jaffe has a big winner on her hands her first time out.
Moving between the emerald green paddocks of the Southern gentry and the raunchy newsroom of Charlotte's bustling daily, Nattie (a Yankee from Philadelphia) has gotten a crash course in the manners and morals of old Carolina society. She's discovered the dirty little secrets of families who mingle with the super-rich but are not above partaking in dark, shameful scams. She knows that Wally Hempstead, the stiff in the stable, was not only a talented trainer, but also an A-one cheat, skilled in blackmail and extortion. And she knows at least a dozen people who wanted to see Wally very dead, including her best friend Gail. The question is--which one of them actually did it?
Teamed with Henry and watched over by Detective Odom, who stars in her dreams, Nattie makes the rounds of the Carolina show horse circuit, pumping society matrons for scandals, tracking down trainers and braiders, chatting up the slim, blond girls who paid Wally Hempstead major bucks to make them winners.
But as she closes in on the truth, Nattie becomes the target for a series of increasingly savage death threats, not only to herself, but to her beloved horse, Brenda Starr....
As sleek and stylish as a thoroughbred, Horse of a Different Killer races to a climax that will leave readers gasping in surprise. Dick Francis and Bill Shoemaker, step aside. With Horse of a Different Killer, Jaffe has a big winner on her hands her first time out.
