THE HOUNDS AND THE FURY
by Rita Mae Brown
The quarry is human when a murderer joins the foxhunt.
Jane Arnold, aka Sister, is master of foxhounds at the Jefferson Hunt Club. At 73, she’s tough as nails and clever as a fox. A student of nature, she takes great pleasure in her beloved Virginia countryside and her friends both human and animal. But she doesn’t cotton to two newer members of the hunt: wealthy Crawford Howard, who buys his own pack when he doesn’t advance quickly enough at JHC, and talented but arrogant Jason Woods, a cancer specialist who wants to be a whipper-in. When Sister’s longtime companion Gray Lorillard takes on the job of auditing the books of a local firm, he discovers that cancer survivor Iffy (née Iphigenia) Demetrios has been siphoning off money for years. Soon after Iffy is found murdered, someone shoots Gray’s brother. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Jane uses her finely attuned sense of people and animals to answer the question.
As fast-paced as the foxhunts Brown clearly loves, with Sister an older version of Harry Haristeen in the popular Mrs. Murphy series (Sour Puss, March 2006, etc.). Though the villain’s not hard to find, Brown makes the hunt enjoyable.