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DEAD MAN'S TOUCH
by Kit Ehrman
Poisoned Pen Press, November 2003
314 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 1590580893


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Kit Ehrman's probably sick and tired of being compared to Dick Francis, but the fact remains that we're not exactly over-run with good crime writers knocking out pacy, exciting books set in the horse world.

Ehrman's hero Steve Cline made his first appearance in AT RISK, one of my top books of 2003. And the follow-up, DEAD MAN'S TOUCH, is pretty damn good as well. It's set in the searing heat of Maryland, and the horse world is so real you can almost smell it.

We left Steve looking more than a tad the worse for wear at the end of AT RISK. Where Francis's wonderfully stiff-upper-lipped Brits would have shaken off their injuries and climbed into the saddle again (both physically and metaphorically), Steve is struggling. He's still not back at work and is at a pretty low ebb. This isn't helped by the news that his estranged father has just died in a car crash.

The funeral turns into one of those family spats so beloved of fiction when Steve's hideous older brother Robert calls him a bastard -- and means it. Steve, it turns out, is the product of an affair between his vapid mother and Christopher Kessler, a racehorse trainer.

Steve sets out to track down his real father. Kessler assumes Steve is part of a group of men who are trying to get him to throw races in a result-fixing scam. When Steve reveals who he really is, Kessler asks him to go undercover at the training barn to try to find out who is doping the horses. As the bodies pile up, Steve has to save himself as well as the father he has only just met.

It's a slightly clunky plot device, but it works -- simply because Ehrman's books are so steeped in the horse world. DEAD MAN'S TOUCH stumbles a little when it comes to characterisation, as Steve's relationship with his real father needs more depth, as do the supporting cast.

Steve's one of those 20-somethings who thinks with his dick, which gets rather dull after a while when he proclaims his love for girlfriend Rachel, then has a quick roll in the hay with passing stable girls. Oh, and is there any chance of him not using gay as a routine insult -- that's getting equally tiresome. Yes thank you, I've been a sports reporter and know all about changing room banter. But there are some stereotypes we can live without . . .

That aside, this is a series that looks to have a sound pedigree, and Ehrman has given herself plenty of thoroughbred material to work with in future books.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, April 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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