PEG AND ROSE PLAY THE PONIES

Dog breeder Peg Turnbull ups her game as she plunges headfirst into the world of thoroughbred horse racing.

Peg has always let the staff at Six Oaks Farm handle the sales of brood mare Lucky Luna’s offspring. This year, though, the Keeneland September Yearling Sale overlaps so nicely with the Bluegrass Cluster dog show in Lexington that she decides to drive down to Kentucky over Labor Day weekend to witness the sale of Luna’s latest colt in person. Asking her late husband’s sister, Rose Donovan, to come with her may feel like a stretch, since the sisters-in-law have just recently patched up their rocky relationship in an uneasy truce. But Peg seems eager to prove to Rose that the principles that lead someone to become one of the country’s top breeders of standard poodles apply equally well to thoroughbreds. Having spent most of her adult life living among the Sisters of Divine Mercy, Rose is hardly equipped to deal with the rough and tumble world of horse racing, but she provides an important counterweight to Peg’s unbridled exuberance. Rose’s knack for moderation becomes especially important when Jim Grable, the yearling manager at Six Oaks, is brutally murdered. The senior sleuths discover that the higher the stakes, the higher the human capacity for evil. Taking the sisters-in-law’s complicated relationship to a new level, Berenson combines a thorough tutorial on the care of yearlings with a chilling account of the vice than can infect those who care for them.

Berenson at her best.