Hex

February 10, 2003
Ruby Murphy, 33-year-old animal lover and recovering alcoholic, makes a lovably quirky heroine in Estep's debut mystery. Bored with her job at the Coney Island Museum, Ruby agrees through a misunderstanding with "a willowy blonde woman" she meets on the subway to follow the woman's shady boyfriend. Soon Ruby is a hotwalker at Belmont Racetrack, indulging in her lifelong love of horses while tracking the slippery Frank, a horse groom and former trainer. When an obnoxious jockey infatuated with Frank dies suddenly, Ruby smells foul play and decides to investigate. Against the advice of her friends and neighbors, Ruby divides her time between the racetrack and yoga, classical piano lessons and buying organic ground turkey for her cats. What sets this book apart is its use of six narrators, including Ruby herself. At times confusing and annoying, this technique nonetheless adds texture and subtle shading. While Estep is no Dick Francis, she knows horses and aptly describes the folks who build their lives around them for better or worse. A charming mass of contradictions, Ruby is a female sleuth much like Sparkle Hayter's Robin Hudson, stomping around New York one step ahead of chaos. (Mar. 5)FYI:Estep is the author of
Diary of an Emotional Idiot (1997), a novel, and
Soft Maniacs (1999), a short story collection.

April 1, 2003
Hex launches a new mystery series by poetry slam artist and novelist Estep (Diary of an Emotional Idiot). The improbable investigator is Ruby Murphy, who is addicted to Coney Island, where she lives and works part-time at the downtrodden Coney Island Museum. Hired by a woman she meets on the subway to find out if her lover is cheating, Ruby takes a job as a walker at Belmont Racetrack where he works and becomes embroiled in murder. The novel brings together a cross section of characters, from Ruby's Puerto Rican neighbor who has had botched breast surgery; to Oliver, dying of AIDS; to her organic turkey-eating cats; to all the denizens at the track. Alternating voices and perspectives propel the story forward, but the attraction here are the novel's inhabitants much more than the mystery.-Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2003
Ruby Murphy is an accidental sleuth and not a willing one. She would much prefer to keep bumping along in her dead-end job at a musty museum on Coney Island, taking piano and yoga lessons, and tending to her unappreciative cats and her motley collection of eccentric friends. But when she tells a gratuitous lie to a mysterious woman she meets on a subway, she finds herself being recruited for cloak-and-dagger duty at Belmont Park, which constitutes spying on a thug who may or may not be cheating on his girlfriend and, incidentally, killing horses. Ruby's affection for animals leads her to investigate the latter possibility a bit too vigorously, and soon her apartment is ransacked and her life threatened. It's a ride as horrifying as Ruby's beloved Cyclone, the monster roller coaster in the Coney Island amusement park, but the infectiously likable Ruby makes such a great companion that, once it's over, you'd like to go again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)