Sable Jones stars in a novella about a stud farm and a suspicious death. KILLED FOR A KING’S RANSOM makes reference to a stallion, called King’s Ransom, worth the proverbial sum of money, too.
Sable lives at Silver Run rescue stables, where she helps to retrain Thoroughbreds that have come off the track. These horses may have been poorly handled; time is wasting, and money won’t earn itself. Sable gets a contract to handle the Colts at Coventry Farm in Pennsylvania.
The longstanding barn manager, Dottie Crane, welcomes Sable, her personal horse Blaze, and dog Max. The cast list is limited, so we don’t meet all the grooms, but this is a thriving enterprise. That night, however, the owner of the stud farm dies. The next day, Sable learns that he was found dead in the stallion’s stable, and the horse has vanished. Nobody is suggesting the elderly stallion harmed the man; all seems quiet, and maybe Gerald Whitfield, a man in his seventies, just had a heart attack. His son Phillip and daughter Kareena stand to inherit. But where is the valuable horse? Sable investigates, along with the police, of course.
A few points seem strange to me. No CCTV? No RFID microchip in the horse? Records on paper instead of a spreadsheet? How come a stud farm of this status only had one stud, when an accident could happen at any time? They would surely have had a few promising colts and kept them for potential studs. As well, there are many issues that could compromise a TB bloodline, and I was looking out for them, but we don’t get answers. This is like a Dick Francis thriller with half the solution.
I love any story about horses, so I am pleased to see a new stable hand on the block. I’ll look out for more in this series called A Suspicious Death Cosy Mystery. I would like the style to move a bit faster, though. We keep getting told that somebody makes a remark in a deliberate fashion, as if to hide the weight of years of deceit, or something. I find it’s tedious and just pads out the pages. Also, if you don’t know anything about keeping horses at stud, what they eat, how long mares stay, or when foals are sold, you still won’t. I would prefer to pad the story with detail for verisimilitude.
Author Ellis Thorne assures us that Blaze and Max are real, though everyone else is invented. KILLED FOR A KING’S RANSOM should be enjoyed by lovers of horsey crime stories. The novella length is just right for a journey, and the thoughtful portraits may hook the reader.
Horse-rescue owner Sable Jones is settling into a temporary training contract at Coventry Farm when the unthinkable happens, its legendary stallion, King’s Ransom, vanishes overnight, and the farm’s owner is found dead in the barn.
The death is quickly labelled a robbery gone wrong. A valuable horse stolen. An old man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Case closed.
But Sable knows horses and nothing about King’s Ransom’s disappearance makes sense.
The powerful estate manager who never misses a detail.
A son with too much to gain and too little grief.
A rival breeder who wanted the stallion badly enough to make an offer that was refused.
And a farm with a past that doesn’t quite match its records.
With Blaze at her side, Max on alert, and whispers of bloodlines, secrets, and long-buried truths surfacing, Sable begins to pull at threads someone worked very hard to keep hidden.
Because at Coventry Farm, nothing is ever just about the horses.
And this wasn’t just theft.
Can Sable uncover the truth before the trail, and the killer, disappear for good?
No excerpt available.
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