Hoof Beat
Stoic and good natured, but with a weakness for blundering into life-threatening situations, Nelson Leatherby moves from London to New York, filled with optimism at his arrival in the Big Apple. Within days he meets the singularly brainy and beautiful horse-lover, Portia Marchese, and his good fortune skyrockets as he is drawn into the world of racing and professional riding. But he has no idea of the mayhem that awaits him.
Nelson’s longing for Portia plays out as the two find themselves on a collision course with an international criminal cartel of race-fixers, thugs, and drug-dealers. As Leatherby learns one lesson after another in the perplexing world of horsemanship, the action moves from the rural beauty of the Hudson Valley to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, from the dusty plains below the Sierra Madre Occidental to the race tracks of Barbados, Belmont and Saratoga.
Although packed with comic situations, the narrative explores the amazing relationship that exists between horse and human, and the inevitable cast of characters inhabiting the equestrian world—the loving and the cruel, the bold and the timid, the accomplished and the incompetent, the authentic and the deceitful, all united by the knowledge that their lives would be paler and dimmer were it not for one extraordinary animal: the horse.
