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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 6 |
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Some puzzling deaths
and a host of suspects
of TheColumnists.com
Gail McCarthy is
so mad at new neighbor Lindee Stone that she actually wishes
the woman were dead. And--Voila!--within the next 24 hours,
Lindee's horse rears up during a practice barrel run, throws
Lindee and then falls over backwards--right on top of her. When
they get the horse off her broken body, Lindee Stone is stone-cold
dead.
As uncomfortable as that makes Gail feel, she soon discovers she wasn't the only one wishing for Stone's demise that day. In fact, there were so many people rooting for her death that it's a wonder a huge cheer didn't rise up and echo through the hills around Stone's ranch property that day.
Gail's quarrel with Lindee Stone was a simple one: The woman had pressured the old lady who owns the pasture adjoining Gail's property into evicting Gail's horses from the acrerage and leasing it to her instead for the use of Lindee's horses. You might even call what Lindee did blackmail: She threatened to report the old lady to the county building inspector for having illegal structures on her property unless she agreed to let Lindee have the pasture for grazing.
And that was typical Lindee Stone behavior. She had set up a booming "horse academy" on her own property and had intimidated most of her clients in very short order. She was a mean-spirited, promiscuous woman who used men and threw them away afterwards, leaving a growing cadre of angry ex-lovers and a good number of potentially homicidal wives whose husbands she'd seduced and abandoned.
That huge welling-up of anti-Lindee hatred is one of the reasons Gail begins to wonder how such an experienced horsewoman could have wound up being crushed under a falling horse. Gail witnessed the tragic fall--and she could swear Lindee looked as if she'd passed out before she hit the turf. Did she suffer a seizure, a stroke, a heart attack? Or did somebody slip her something that knocked her out before she began her fateful practice run?
If you're familiar with Laura Crum's Gail McCarthy mysteries, you don't need to wonder very long. Yes, there will be a police investigation and, once the layers of animosity toward Lindee are peeled away, it's pretty clear someone helped her on her way to that great pasture in the sky.
The new mystery is "Chasing Cans" (Perseverance Press, $14.95) and its No. 10 in Crum's series about horse vet Gail McCarthy, who operates in Santa Cruz County in California's central coast area. When we meet Gail this time, she still hasn't gone back to work in her veterinary practice. Now the mother of Mac, her baby boy, she has decided to be a full-time mom while Blue, her husband, brings home the bacon.
But it's amazing how much bad stuff goes on in the rural areas of Santa Cruz County, a real-life location that had the unusual distinction of having three serial killers piling up bodies simultaneously in the wild and crazy 1970s. If you think it stretches the imagination to have Gail wander into a murder scene without going more than a few hundred yards from her front porch, then you don't know Santa Cruz County. (I was born and raised there and started my career in journalism working the local police beat there.)
The title of the new mystery comes from the competitive world of barrel racing--horses run a measured course, dodging in and out and around barrels or large metal garbage cans, while being timed against their competitors. Hence, a rider doing what Lindee Stone is doing when her horse balks at a turn: Chasing cans.
Make no mistake about it, Laura Crum knows what she writes about--thoroughly. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised, during a visit to her home some years ago, to find the house, the horses, the dogs and just about everything else from her books actually exists in her real life.
So, the Gail McCarthy mysteries always have the ring of truth to them. And they're also first class mysteries. She has evolved a fast-paced, entertaining style that's very much like that of one of her literary idols, Dick Francis, the king of the "equestrian mysteries" since the early 1960s.
As usual, Gail gets right in the middle of the investigation being carried out by her friend Jeri Ward, a detective for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office. And when the person responsible for Lindee's death and the near-fatal injury to another character in the story learns that Gail is getting too close to the truth about what happened, Gail is suddenly a very vulnerable quarry: An unarmed woman, alone with her infant child, being stalked by a killer.
I can't praise the McCarthy mysteries enough. You don't have to be a horse nut to get enormous fun out of them, although you may feel a little hankering to mount up now and then while you're reading them.
"Chasing Cans" won't formally be published until April, but you can pre-order it now from www.amazon.com at the discounted price of $10.17, a genuine bargain for a very good mystery.
©2008 by Ron Miller.
The book cover illustration by Peter Thorpe is courtesy of Perseverance
Press. This column first posted Jan. 28, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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