Dead Heat

by William Murray

Dead Heat is a story of obsessions--of people driven to pursue their dreams and their desires at whatever cost. The haunted young woman who shows up one day outside the horse trainer, Jake Fontana's tack room at the Santa Anita racetrack is not merely looking for work, but has an agenda: she wants to become a great race rider.

300 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

William Murray was an American fiction editor and staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years. He wrote a series of mystery novels set in the world of horse racing, many featuring Shifty Lou Anderson, a professional magician and horseplayer. Among his many contributions to The New Yorker was the magazine's "Letters from Italy" of which he was the sole author. The majority of his later years were spent living in Del Mar, California, "exactly 3.2 miles from the finish line" of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. Murray died in March 2005 at age 78. Just prior to his death, Murray had completed a book about Chicago's Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.

Reviews

[Peter Weissman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was taken by the racetrack accuracy of this book, the author's evident familiarity with the world of trainers and owners, jockeys and agents; stakes horses, horses running for a claiming price, horses in maiden races, etc. And Murray clearly knows the ins and outs of an actual race, from the influence of the track surface on a particular horse to the predilections of certain horses to run in front and others to come from behind. And he knows a thing or two about betting as well. All of which, as a racetrack railbird over the years, I appreciated and enjoyed.

But as a mystery reader, I found the plot unconvincing and at times uninteresting, drawn as it is against the so much more convincing details of the racing game. And after a while the characters' repeated assertions about how wonderful the world of the racetrack is--better than any other--put me off my feed, so to speak. Though I don't disagree with the sentiment, it yanked me away from the story and all but sank the plot beneath the notion that the mystery was no more than a device to enable Murray to talk about the world of racing.

[Joan Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murray was excellent in portraying the racing scene accurately, in this his final book, as well as in preceding volumes. The rationale for jockey Jill’s behavior was unconvincing; one expected far more of a resolution.