Fire Horse

Bill Shoemaker, the greatest jockey of all time, made a smashing fiction debut with his first novel, Stalking Horse, starring jockey-turned-sleuth Coley Killebrew. Now Coley is back, and this time he's up against the toughest odds he's ever faced. It all starts when Johnny Rousseau, Coley's partner in the Horse's Neck Bar and Grill, finds himself saddled with a little problem named Paula Dresner. Gorgeous, rich, and spoiled rotten, Paula has Johnny twisted around her manicured little finger -- but he's not too love-blind to see that she's gotten herself mixed up in some very suspicious business. Johnny can't figure out whether Paula's trouble has to do with her father, Wilton Dresner, the ultra-conservative political pundit, or with her creepy brother Neil, who's left a trail of bad checks in Vegas. He enlists his old pal Coley to find out. Paula's trail leads Coley to a peculiar passel of racetrack photos, a foul-mouthed, washed-up jockey with secrets to keep, some cut-rate hoodlums making nocturnal shipments of high-priced thoroughbreds, and one very dead body. And then there's the surprising interest in the case evinced by one Raymond Starbuck, the man who once upon a time put Coley out of business as a jockey, and who just happens to be the protective father of Coley's beautiful girlfriend, Lea. Now, with the help -- and sometimes the hindrance -- of Lea and Starbuck, Coley begins to put the pieces together. As he does, things get hotter and hotter. It's a fire than may consume some of the finest thoroughbreds in the country -- and Coley, too.