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When fashionista Samantha Kidd’s father-in-law arranges a week on the dude ranch he’s aiming to buy, Samantha preps for blue skies and clean living. But all too soon she learns life on the ranch is anything but calm. When the owner is found dead inside one of the stables, all signs point to murder.
As Samantha wrangles clue after clue, she smells something rotten—and it’s not manure. In her quest for the truth, she encounters quirky cowhands, brazen barrel racers, and suspicious horseplay—not to mention a social paradigm straight from the eighteen hundreds. Can Samantha bring justice to the wild west of eastern New Jersey, or will a renegade ranch dweller get away with murder?
Reviews
In this solid cozy from Vallere (Gilt Trip), former fashion buyer Samantha Kidd probes a murder at a New Jersey dude ranch. Samantha and her husband, Nick, have traveled from Philadelphia to join her father-in-law, Nick Sr., at the Down Home Ranch for a weeklong stay. Nick Sr. is toying with the idea of purchasing the property from its current owner, Joey Baldwin. Samantha hopes to take it easy, but her plan goes awry when she discovers Baldwin’s bludgeoned corpse in an empty horse stable. The situation triggers Samantha’s investigative instincts, and, despite the local sheriff’s warning to stay out of the case, she starts investigating staff members, Baldwin’s widow, and other suspects. Vallere approaches the material—and Samantha’s narration—with a light touch; the gumshoe makes her grim discovery because she learned from “six seasons of Yellowstone” that horses shouldn’t be wandering a farm alone at night. When the solution comes, it’s clever and satisfying. Readers in the mood for a low-stakes whodunit will be charmed. (Self-published)
