Riders Down
$24.95
| Title | Range | Discount |
|---|---|---|
| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
- Description
- Additional information
Description
Matt quickly comes to believe that the fate of the bookie is tied to a series of races whose outcomes have been manipulated. His quest is aided by horse trainer Maggie Collins and Dave Zimmer, a professional gambler known as The Fount for his reputation as an encyclopedic source of information. Eventually, going as far afield as Las Vegas and Madison, Wisconsin, they fix their sights on a brilliant sociopath. But why would this psycho have plotted a race-fixing scheme?
Spiced with the kind of lively language that marked Blind Switch, the author’s debut novel (2004), Riders Down offers striking insights into the world of horse racing and the possibilities of its corruption.
No one really notices that a fix may be in until Matt O’Connor, a Chicago-based columnist for a national racing newspaper, gets a call from Moe Kellman, a horse-owning acquaintance. Kellman’s question for Matt: Was the death of ninety-two-year-old Bernard Glockner, Chicago’s oldest active bookmaker, suicide or murder?
Booklist *STARRED REVIEW*
McEvoy has created a winning protagonist in Chicago turf writer Matt O’Connor, who has an abundance of friends in mostly low places and his finger firmly on the pulse of the national horse racing scene. He has created an even better villain in Claude “the professor” Bledsoe, whose cushy life as a perpetual student will come to an abrupt end unless he can produce $1 million before his trust fund expires in a few months’ time. No $1 million, and it’s straight to the job market at the age of 50, sans resume, but if he can come up with that much money, he’ll inherit Grandma Bledsoe’s fortune and be set for life.”Bledsoe, a brilliant if monstrously egomaniacal psychopath, hatches an ingenuious plot to amass the needed dough by betting on fixed races. The scent of something rotten at the track attracts O’Connor, however, and soon the writer and his girlfriend, trainer Maggie Collins, are scheduled to share the fate of nine other racetrackers who have been sacrificed for the greater good of Bledsoe’s financial security. “McEvoy, who was himself a correspondent for ‘Daily Racing Form’ for many years, is dead-on in his descriptions and accounts of Thoroughbred racing. He also gives us characters we can care about and suspense enough to make the blood race like a stakes-winning sprinter. That’s all we ask of a racetrack thriller, and McEvoy delivers. — Booklist, 2/15/06
Additional information
| Weight | 1 oz |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 1 × 6 × 9 in |
