More on Connie Holt: The Case of the Three Dead Horses

More on Connie Holt, as discovered in The Case of the Three Dead Horses. Connie is a former teacher from a rust-bucket city in the north, who comes to Virginia with her husband Mike, to whom she has been married since they were teenagers. He hopes to start a consulting business to help companies with their computer problems. But he fails again, and when Connie won't go with him to another city and another failure, he leaves her with a little money and a rundown truck. At a restaurant where Connie is working as a waitress (she's terrible at it), she meets customer Cary McCutcheon, presiding over a table of horse trainers and owners. He watches with kindly concern as the tall, thin woman with unruly red hair jugggles a large tray of hot beef and gravy sandwiches. There's something about her that appeals to him, and when she apologizes for her clumsiness, he offers her a job at the McCutcheon Equine Insurance Agency. She's successful as a receptionist but becomes fascinated with the investigators' jobs and soon asks Cary if he'll train her. By this time, he has come to admire her even more for her willingness to work hard. Overcoming the local prejudice against women in field work held by many of his male clients won't be easy. But eventually she wins them over by sheer persistence. Things are going quite well for Connie until horses start dying for no good reason. That is when The Case of the Three Dead Horses starts in earnest.

Tomorrow, a little about the plot of this first novel in the Connie Holt series.