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Trade Ellis mystery #2
The Sporting Club
One man's sport is another man's murder....
Private eye Trade Ellis, part cowgirl, part Apache, has her hands full running her Arizona ranch. But when Victoria Carpenter, the famous romance writer, shows up with gruesome stories about repressed childhood memories, all going back over thirty years, Trade jumps at the chance to take the case.
Victoria's flashbacks include her father's so-called Sporting Club and its not-so-innocent picnics, where the wives talked, the children played...and the husbands made a brutal sport of hate and death. She's convinced that her father and his hunting buddies were racist killers. But how do you investigate decades-old crimes? Especially with no bodies, no police reports, and the only accuser a woman who makes up stories for a living. When the threatening phone calls begin and a cross is set ablaze on Trade's ranch, it soon appears there will be at least two more bodies they won't have to dig out of the past-Victoria's and Trade's.
Private eye Trade Ellis, part cowgirl, part Apache, has her hands full running her Arizona ranch. But when Victoria Carpenter, the famous romance writer, shows up with gruesome stories about repressed childhood memories, all going back over thirty years, Trade jumps at the chance to take the case.
Victoria's flashbacks include her father's so-called Sporting Club and its not-so-innocent picnics, where the wives talked, the children played...and the husbands made a brutal sport of hate and death. She's convinced that her father and his hunting buddies were racist killers. But how do you investigate decades-old crimes? Especially with no bodies, no police reports, and the only accuser a woman who makes up stories for a living. When the threatening phone calls begin and a cross is set ablaze on Trade's ranch, it soon appears there will be at least two more bodies they won't have to dig out of the past-Victoria's and Trade's.
- GenresMystery
320 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published February 1, 2000
20 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 15, 2020
PROTAGONIST: Trade Ellis, rancher and PI
SETTING: Tucson, AZ
SERIES: #2
RATING: 3.5
WHY: PI Trade Ellis runs a ranch in Arizona and also serves as a prviate investigator. She is hired by successful romance writer Victoria Carpenter to sort out her repressed memories of attending "picnics" as a child where black men were killed for sport. She wants Trade to see if there's any truth to this. Of course, Trade is skeptical. Trying to find information about something that happened in 1963 is very difficult. Trade is a dogged investigator, and that results in a tedious narrative of all the avenues that she follows.
SETTING: Tucson, AZ
SERIES: #2
RATING: 3.5
WHY: PI Trade Ellis runs a ranch in Arizona and also serves as a prviate investigator. She is hired by successful romance writer Victoria Carpenter to sort out her repressed memories of attending "picnics" as a child where black men were killed for sport. She wants Trade to see if there's any truth to this. Of course, Trade is skeptical. Trying to find information about something that happened in 1963 is very difficult. Trade is a dogged investigator, and that results in a tedious narrative of all the avenues that she follows.
March 3, 2010
Browning is a favorite, not just because she knows Tucson inside and out (which helps in my case), but her mysteries are solidly written and concise. Ellis is a fine female detective. While this story is ten years old, it still retains a timeliness. That could be due to the fact that Tucson is timeless; a sleepy desert town content to remain exactly as it is—unpolished, down-to-earth and just enough beneath the surface to keep outsiders wondering.
:)
:)
January 30, 2017
This was the first Trade Ellis that I read. I enjoyed it, and said I would read others (which I did). This was about a romance writer who comes to Trade because she is remembering bits and pieces from childhood family "picnics", in which hunters, including her father, are killing blacks. Could this be true? Then the trouble starts.
October 26, 2007
4.5/B+ -- 2nd in Trade Ellis sereis -- PI/Rancher in AZ -- Victoria, a romance novelist, is having flashbacks of her father involved in a Sporting Club where an African-Ameri9can father & 2 sons were murdered.
May 14, 2007
Read compulsorily, utterly hackneyed at points, utterly unbelievable at others.
April 8, 2009
Yawn.
October 4, 2009
Some of the plotline was distastful, but, the story overall is well-written.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews