Product Description

Planning their wedding at High Hope horse farm is trouble enough for teaching fellow Sarah Deane and her fianc Dr. Alex McKenzie. But now Sarah's widowed Aunt Julia, the farm's crusty, independent owner, is receiving threatening nursery rhymes with her morning paper; a stableman's been mysteriously injured; and someone's taking pot shots at the barn.Could the disturbing events have to do with a mining company that's out to lasso local land? Or with Tilly, a loopy neighbor who thinks it's in her stars to swap farms with Julia? Or even with Julia's persistent suitor, Colonel Dodge, who's all too eager to saddle up and charge to her rescue?Though the wedding goes off without a hitch, Sarah and Alex are reined in from their honeymoon when the stable turns up a gruesome corpse...and it doesn't take more than horse sense to recognize foul play.AUTHORBIO: Along with her horse, Conky Noodle, J.S. BORTHWICK lives on the Maine coast, where most of her books are set.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1135336 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In their sixth engaging and literate adventure, following Dude on Arrival , Sarah Deane, English teacher and Ph.D. candidate at Maine's Bowmouth College, and her fiance, physician Alex McKenzie, are distracted from wedding plans when Sarah's widowed Aunt Julia begins receiving threatening notes. Crusty, independent Julia, owner of High Hope Farm, is initially untroubled by the hand-delivered nursery rhymes rewritten with unnerving twists, e.g., "Julia Clancy sat on a wall / Julia Clancy had a great fall." The list of possible culprits includes neighbor Colonel Harvey Dodge, a persistent suitor who thinks he and Julia should marry, blending their farms and their lives; librarian Tilly Martin, who says that she has learned from the stars and runes that each person in the area should take over a neighbor's property; a mining company that has shown a recent interest in local mineral rights. The threats continue, leading finally, during Sarah and Alex's reception at Julia's beloved horse farm, to a suspicious death. In this character-oriented mystery, Borthwick makes the suspects, Julia's neighbors and the mining company seem largely, though not entirely, innocent, giving Sarah and Alex a challenging puzzle to solve--as though pulling off a wedding were a piece of cake.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Nice but nosy English teacher Sarah Deane (Dude on Arrival, etc.), newly married to Dr. Alex McKenzie, is embroiled in the problems of her neighbors in Union, Maine. Her Aunt Julia, aging but feisty owner of High Hope horse farm, is beleaguered by threatening unsigned letters; the persistent marriage proposals of Colonel Harvey Dodge, owner of the going-to-seed farm next door; rumors of farm sales to Norminco, a mining conglomerate; and, finally, the disappearance of skilled but erratic workers Sean and Rafe and the murder of the Colonel's right-hand man, Farney Thompson, while on loan to Julia. Complicating all this are the ravings of ditsy Tilly Martin, of Appleyard farm; the cool calculating of Winka and Neil Wentworth, owners of Highfeather summer camp; and the resistance to the mining company of Merrilark Camp's Brad Pfeifer. Meanwhile, there are endless details of horse meets, races, jumping competitions, riding lessons, etc.--along with characters who belie, one and all, the Maine reputation for terseness of speech. A windy bore, overstuffed with plot twists, horse lore, and talky but (with the exception of Tilly) uncompelling characters. No joy, except for dedicated horse-lovers. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Customer Reviews

Uneven
This book easily kept my interest, but at various parts I felt like I was hitting the wall in a marathon. I'm not sure why the book is as lengthy as it is. Many of the "events" such as the wedding, derby party, and horse show came off as contrived. It was as if the author struggled to imagine different scenarios to bring the suspects together for another clue to emerge. If that is the case, then what would have helped was some meaningful character development not just for the sake of writing a mystery. The chain of events should have been more seamless. The pace of the plot is very uneven, especially during the first third of the book which seems to get nowhere fast. As a reader noted in reviewing another of this author's works, detective Sarah is unmemorable, not fully developed. The fact that Sarah is a teaching fellow in English and that her husband is a doctor is wasted. They barely have presence in the story, in furthering the mystery, or in solving the crime. (The pivotal episode where Sarah gets to use her English lit background is pretty shallow.) Maybe one of the problems is that this "drawing room mystery" set in the Maine countryside makes too small of a world to create any sustained intrigue? Having said all of this, however, the book did manage to keep my attention for some reason. Very mixed review.