"Banks' technique…is as sharp as any killer's knife blade."—The Washington Post

"Crisply flip dialogue is her metier."—Los Angeles Times

"Suppose Lucille Ball and P. G. Wodehouse had a child, and that child, now a grown woman, possessed Ms. Ball's genius for comic misadventure and Mr. Wodehouse's sublime lightheartedness and verbal brilliance. What sort of novels would such a woman write? I'm guessing she'd write novels very much like the ones written by Carolyn Banks, whose mysteries starring the irrepressible Robin Vaughan are hilarious entertainments in which our heroine, sometimes lost, sometimes confused, sometimes obsessed (or at least distracted) fights her way through thickets of deception and wrong-doing, often putting her own life in jeopardy to save the day, or the horse, or both. You'll love these books."—William Browning Spencer, author of Zod Wallop and Resume With Monsters

"Robin, are you absolutely sure?"

This was my husband, asking if I wanted him to come along with me while I schlepped around Guanajuato from one horse farm to another.

If you know Jeet at all, you know what a wrench it must have been for him to ask me that. Because if there's one thing Jeet can live without, it's horse farms. Horse farms and the horses that inhabit them.

"I'm sure," I said, my heart swelling the way your heart will swell when you have a sudden extra-big rush of love for someone.

But then he had to go and spoil it by wagging his finger at me. "Just remember," he warned. "You aren't in America. You have to be careful down here. It isn't—"

"Please, Jeet," I said. "You told me about the Napoleonic Code about thirty-three times already. And I get it. Now relax. I'll be fine." I turned away and rolled my eyes. Honestly. You'd think I was fourteen years old!

"I'm not trying to be a pill," he said. "Mexican prisons are the pits. You could get into one and never get out or—"