Chestnut Mare, Beware

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Jaffe gallops into the winner's circle with the second (after Horse of a Different Killer) investigation featuring horse-crazy Natalie Gold, fashion writer for the Charlotte Commercial Appeal. Eager to attend a riding clinic taught by a famous trainer in Virginia horse country, Gold promises to write a page-one story on the four-year-old death of horsewoman and former Miss Connecticut Josane Ashmore. As ambitious as she was beautiful, Josane ran with a fast crowd in exclusive Middleburg, Va., thanks to a discreet sugar daddy. Josane's mother insists that her daughter's death was not caused by a fall from a horse but was a murder her friends tried to cover up. Poking through circumstances surrounding the event, Gold finds an abusive ex-boyfriend, an employee fired for theft and a nurse who insists that the dead woman wasn't bruised when she was brought to the hospital. Gold also offers moral support to fellow Appeal reporter Henry Goode, who is investigating vague, threatening letters sent to the paper. With the letters came lists of bigwigs in Virginia and the Carolinas with no apparent connection to each other. When these personages start dying in alphabetical order, their link becomes clear: the tobacco industry. Gold may be only a workhorse on the newspaper, but her devotion to the amateur-show circuit and her growing skills as a horsewoman gain her entre into the rarefied milieu of the horsey set. Its glitter contrasts with the sordid world of the tobacco industry until the two investigations are bound together as smoothly as horse and rider in dressage. Author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Jaffe's second Natalie Gold mystery places the Charlotte newspaper reporter in jeopardy once again. Usually stuck with features and fashion, she finagles a chance to investigate and write about the suspicious death of a former North Carolina beauty queen in Virginia horse country. Natalie's favorite cohort from work, looking for clues in a separate case, assists in pinning down elusive facts about the victimlike who bankrolled her expensive horses, drugs, and shop. Plenty of humor, action, and chatty prose form an independent heroine.

Kirkus Reviews

Four years after Josane Ashmore was pronounced dead, her mother Reenie's still convinced her wayward horse didn't accidentally throw her, and she wants Natalie Gold, of the Charlotte Commercial Appeal, to find out who murdered her. But how can Nattie solve the mystery when she's stuck behind the features desk, and her slave-driving editor will give her and investigative reporter Henry Goode only a week on the story, and Henry's preoccupied by a rambling letter he and a lot of other folks have been sent a copy of—a vaguely threatening letter accompanied by a very specific, indeed alphabetized, list of ostensible targets? More to the point, how can Nattie ever get down to brass tacks when Jaffe (Horse of a Different Killer, 1995) canters through the leisurely first half of her tale as if through a weekend in the country? Relax and enjoy Nattie's ingratiating complaints about everything from the dearth of good men on the show-jumping circuit to the problems of being Jewish during a Dixie Yuletide, and eventually you'll be rewarded with revelations linking Josane's death to big tobacco, petty jealousy, and that tidy correspondent's alphabetical list—though not before victims A and B, together with some prime horseflesh and lesser human creatures, are called to abrupt exits.

Plotting as dense as chocolate fudge, if you can overlook that intolerable stretch before the first hurdle.