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Rating: 
Summary: I loved this book!
Review: Cutter was exciting, fast-paced and entertaining, and the equine details were accurate. Just what I was looking for to enliven a rainy evening. A great find for horse and mystery lovers.
Rating: 
Summary: Great first book..
Review: I enjoyed this book ,I found it to be fastpaced and very factual .the setting and storyline were a plus for me . I can highly recommend the book and the author. Mystery and/or horses are not my main interests but the writers style worked for me
Rating:
Summary: I loved this book!
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but not a show stopper
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing debut
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing debut
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm sorry I cannot recommend this book
Review: this book kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. I wish she (Gail McCarthy) really existed. I hope to see more from Laura Crum in the near future!
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