A Taste of Blood and Ashes: A Jared McKean Mystery

A suspicious horse-barn blaze, in which Jared McKean finds human bone fragments, propels Terrell’s colorful but confusing fourth case for the Nashville cop turned PI (after 2014’s River of Glass). The barn’s owners, Zane and Carlin Underwood, are pariahs among much of the Tennessee Walking Horse community because they’re against abusive “soring” practices to train the animals in the lucrative Big Lick gait. And in a rural county where the sheriff is a member of the ruling Trehorne family, with its horse-breeding interests, it’s an open question whether McKean can dig up answers before suffering one of the deadly “accidents” that seem rife. During an investigation largely conducted during a bustling local horse show, Terrell offers an intriguing glimpse of an insular world. But even those not put off by the pidgin English (“More better focus on one thing”) of McKean’s Vietnamese half-sister, Khanh, who serves as his assistant, are likely to be disappointed by the increasingly addled plot and head-scratchingly arbitrary denouement. [em]Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Sept.) [/em]