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THE HOUNDS AND THE FURY
by Rita Mae Brown
Ballantine Books, October 2006
336 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0345465474


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jane Arnold, known as Sister to all, is a proud Southern lady in her seventies. Her love and her passion is the Jefferson Hunting Club, where she is the Master, in charge of every aspect of the club's day-to-day business. Well loved and respected by all her friends, which includes the animals that live in the land surrounding Sister's home and the hunting club, Sister plans and take charge of each of the hunts.

Each day Sister must deal diplomatically with the wealthy members of the club who support it with their generous donations. When Crawford Howard becomes dissatisfied with the lack of respect that he thinks must be directed towards him by the members of the Hunt club, he decides to start his own club by purchasing a pack of hunting hounds and buying a farm where he hopes to build the new posh club. Unfortunately he doesn't know what he is doing and has none of the skills needed to train a pack of dogs, and trouble happens right and left.

Alas, it falls to Sister to clean up the many problems brought about by Howard's dogs because she is the person known as the Hunt Master in the area and she needs to keep the locals happy when there's anything to do with hunting since there's such bad press surrounding the act.

Also upsetting to everyone is the audit of the local manufacturing plant. Sister's beau is called on to oversee the audit and the company's regular bookkeeper, Iffy Demetrios is none too happy about it. At the best of times Iffy is a difficult personality, but lately she has been fighting lung cancer and even with her crush on her oncologist lifting her spirits, Iffy is downright mean. So when her body is suddenly found buried in a shallow grave and two million dollars turns up missing in the audit from the company's books, there seems to be no lack of suspects for her death.

The sheriff of the town is working hard on the case and finds more clues than he can deal with. As he is another fan of Sister's, he asks her to help him find out the truth behind the murder and the theft.

Sister puts her mind to the case, all the while not permitting the murder to affect the Hunting Club's hunts, and intent on finding who would be so crass as to mar the beauty of the location and the correctness of the hunt. She will, of course, find the answer.

Gosh, I hated this book. I didn't mind that the animals in the fields thought and spoke to each other with opinions about the hunt and the humans who lived with them. I rather liked that aspect of the book. What I didn't like was the idea of hunting. I just don't like that a small creature is scared for its life in the name of entertainment.

Sister spends a lot of time defending the hunt. She says that people who protest against fox hunting are all just fools who think that hunting is just for the rich. She in certain that any protesting they do is just a way of showing dislike for the wealthy. She insists that fox hunting is a sport for all people no matter their economic level. I guess owning a horse and buying the proper color hunting outfit, boots and crop is covered by food stamps.

She also thinks that since American fox hunting's aim is to run the fox to ground and not usually killing it, means there's no violence. I couldn't disagree more.

Sister is completely sure of her high place in the town's class rankings. She insists that it has nothing to do with money. That would be snobbery, and hunting people are not snobs, says Sister. In that town, one's social rank only insists that you have a long-term connection with the land. You can be a millionaire but will still be looked down upon as an interloper if you weren't born and bred in that area. She also is so sure of her rightness that it's nothing for her to declare that someone who is suffering from side effects from chemo and who sometimes uses a wheelchair is just looking for sympathy. I found Sister to be an annoyingly smug fool, whose ideas are ludicrous.

The book follows hunt upon hunt, letting the readers in on the frightened fox's thoughts and the so-called clever hunters' actions. Page after page describes, in painful detail, who is on what horse, who goes over what bush, what the riders are wearing, and what drinks and luncheon they share. All in all, about three pages are dedicated to the murder mystery and the solution is almost as an afterthought, and is only included because the case is solved in the middle of yet another fox hunt.

THE HOUNDS AND THE FURY is for fox hunting devotees. The murder is tacked on with little investigating and no tension with a less than satisfying solution. If you don't spend time riding with the hounds, there's nothing in this book to interest you.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, November 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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