"Carolyn Banks has a sense of style and wit."—The New York Times

"Crisply flip dialogue is [Banks's] métier."—Los Angeles Times

"Banks's technique...is as sharp as any killer's knife blade."—The Washington Post

"...Brisk dialogue and a smooth transition make this an enjoyable read...The story carries some twists and turns...the reader is held captive until the whole truth comes out. Carolyn Banks creates characters that pull the audience into the storyline. With some surprises along the way, she weaves an entertaining story."--Cherokee, Coffee Time Romance

...We were inside now and the air, as you might imagine, was thick with cigarette smoke. And the place wasn’t air conditioned either. It had the big standing fan that I’d imagined finding at the newspaper office, and it was kind of moving the shafts of thick grey fumes this way and that.

I looked at Jeet, amazed at just how far he’d be willing to go for a decent poached egg. Pretty far, I guessed, since he had probably never in his life held a cigarette between his lips.

“You’ll get used to it,” he told me, reading my mind. “Believe me, it’s better than the other available choices.”

Then we segued into typical travel talk. He asked how my trip had been and where I had the horses ensconced. I regaled him with the story of my encounter with Booger. When I told him where the pasture was, he said, “I’ll be damned.”

“What?”

“That’s a couple of blocks away from the place I rented. No kidding, Robin, you could walk there.”

I reached across the cigarette-scarred Formica surface and took his hand. “Whew,” I said. “Things are coming together after all.”

Something flickered across his face. “Are they?” he said, his voice flat with discouragement.

“Whatever it is, we can get through it,” I told him, wishing I felt the certainty that my voice conveyed.

I know, you’re thinking I’m a hypocrite or something, but I’m really not. I’m just a horse person. A horse person develops a way of saying, “Easy,” or some other there-there kind of soothing word even when terrified. Because to let that terror be known is, when dealing with horses, a major mistake. It merely escalates their own.

So I was horsing Jeet into feeling better, while all the while I was thinking “Yuck,” about Bead in general and “Yikes!” about the fact that, whoever had run Towns over was still somewhere in the universe driving around.

I looked at my fellow diners.

Every single one of them looked like a possible murderer to me.

The only woman in the place was the waitress, and she looked like someone who had been a wrestler in the not too distant past. Her face was sort of marbled—like hamburger meat—and her eyes were dead. Needless to say, she did not smile when she took our order.

Well, my order. She seemed to know what Jeet was going to have.

The only good news was that they didn’t have Diet anything. I ordered a classic Coke. Then I had to have a hamburger and fries because, what else would you have with a Coke?

This couldn’t go on. At this rate, I’ll probably balloon up to one-eighty by morning and be unable to get into even my Lycra riding breeches, I thought.

In fact, everyone in the place, except for Jeet, was beefy and huge. And looking at their plates—heaped with chicken-fried steaks and mashed potatoes and thick white gravy—I could see why.

Then the door swung open and a new prospective diner walked in.

He was as thin as Jeet.