Dead Horses

Rating:
Summary: Dead Horses kept me going until the final page!
Review: As a horse racing nut I found Dead Horses to be great reading. It's the first mystery novel set at a harness race track that I have ever read. I could not figure out who the murderer was until the final pages of the book. It was that well written and thought out.

For a novice or newcomer to horse racing there is a great glossary at the back that will keep you abreast of the racing lingo as you learn the in's and out's of the racing world.

With this being Pat Hewitt's first novel I hope and look forward to reading the second one. She has the style to be the Dick Francis of harness racing.

Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed it and would love to read more by this author.
Review: I greatly enjoyed "Dead Horses", and was impressed by the quality of the writing, the inventiveness of the story line, and the author's life-long familiarity with the world of trotting race horses. My only regret is that I couldn't put the book down, and thus finished it too quickly! It left me wanting more...

You don't have to know about horses to enjoy this book. For those who do, the story has the ring of truth plus the thrill of a good mystery tale, reminding me not a little of the stories by racing mystery writer Dick Francis.

I hope that "Dead Horses" is the first of many stories published by Pat Hewitt.

Rating:
Summary: One of only a handfull of harness racing books.
Review: I was glad to see a harness racing novel published. Unfortunatly, it didn't take long for me to start to find faults in the book. It seemed to me that the author did know harness racing but not from a stable point of view. Real trainers don't have that much time on their hands to run around and solve mysteries. The most obvious problem was how Tony, a trainer for only five years, could manage to have five hundred wins with the number of horses he had. Not likely.All in all, I did like the book it just seemed too tidy to be realistic.

Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed it and would love to read more by this author.
Review: The plot kept me involved and the characters became real. The milieu of harness racing is fresh and interesting. The hero is competent and low key in a (I hate to overuse a comparison, but it's impossible to avoid) very Dick Francis kind of way. I would be very interested in any new titles by this author.