Vaughan Wiles

Hoof Beat Vaughan Wiles

Hoof Beat takes the reader on a high-speed gallop into world of horses and their human handlers, with the action centered around two rival stables in New York's Hudson Valley. Stoic and good natured, but with a weakness for blundering into life-threatening situations, Nelson Leatherby falls in love with the brainy and beautiful Portia Marchese, an accomplished rider, and the two find themselves on a collision course with an international criminal cartel of race-fixers, thugs, and drug-dealers. Leatherby learns one amusing lesson after another in the perplexing world of horsemanship, moving from the rural beauty of upstate New York to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and from the dusty plains below the Sierra Madre Occidental to the race tracks of Barbados, Belmont and Saratoga. The narrative is packed with comic situations and explores the amazing relationship that exists between horse and human, and the colorful 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.