A Three Day Event

by Barbara Kay

An intriguing Canadian mystery set against the fascinating world of competitive horse sport. An engaging and entertaining read” – Elizabeth Elwood, author of The Agatha Principle and Other Mysteries It’s 1992, and language tensions are roiling Montreal. But 100 kilometres away at the peaceful Le Centre Equestre de L’Estrie in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, francophones and anglophones, bonded by their common love of horse sport, get along just fine. Cracks appear in the stable’s sunny façade, though, when Le Centre is designated the site of a prestigious competition for Olympic hopefuls in the disciplines of Dressage, Three-Day Eventing and Jumping. Suddenly personal conflicts surface. Political and language tensions flare. The stable office is vandalized, the walls covered in anti- anglophone graffiti. A beautiful stallion is mutilated. A viciously anti-Semitic fax is sent to Le Centre’s Jewish owner. Three culprits? Two? One? Then the head stable boy’s strangled corpse is discovered. A murder investigation begins, with former Jumper champion Polo Poisson cast as chief sleuth. Suspects abound, as everyone with a stake in Le Centre’s success hated the victim – and with reason. Over the course of three days, Polo tracks all the intertwined mysteries to their source, in the process flushing out a long suppressed mystery about his own past.

476 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2015

Reviews

[B. Glen Rotchin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Kay knows a thing or two about good writing. As one Canada’s most widely read columnists in the National Post, she’s expressed herself forcefully and cogently for years, never mincing her words, garnering the applause of readers and sometimes their ire. Anyone approaching her debut fiction may understandably ask themselves, is Kay as compelling at crafting narrative as she is at opinionating? The answer is an emphatic yes. Many of the strengths evident in her editorials also feature robustly in her fiction. A Three Day Event is, at first glance, a crime novel set at an equestrian center in rural Quebec. The reader is steeped in the high stakes (and elitist) culture and politics of equestrian recreation and sport. But it’s the manner in which Kay employs the backdrop of heightened political, linguistic, and cultural tensions that provides this novel with added dimensions. The action pivots on the murder of a widely loathed groom, a crime complicated by anti-Semitic vandalism and the bizarre mutilation of a prized stallion. The equestrian center is owned by a Jew married to a Quebecoise. It is immediately apparent that Kay is set on exploring much more than the evil deeds perpetrated by a lowly disgruntled bigot. The insular, monied world of horse sport frames an intricate tapestry of relationships weaving together hidden agendas, professional ambitions, resentments, grudges, secrets and love affairs. The protagonist is Polo Poisson, who, although born in a stereotypical Quebecois family on the wrong side of the tracks, has been intriguingly, raised by upper-crust Jews to become a champion horseman. Polo is an unprecedented ethnic creation in Canadian fiction, a melding of immigrant Jewish and pure laine Quebecois; a tortiere pie baked in a poppy seed bagel crust. It’s a wonder that Kay can pull off such a character successfully, which she does, and the story of how Polo arrived on the steps of his adopted family is as touchingly believable as it is unusual. It’s up to Polo to solve the murder, and it’s his mixed background that provides him with the intellectual and emotional tools required to tease out the convolutions of the crime. If there is a flaw to the novel it’s one of ambition. Kay’s reach sometimes exceeds her grasp and there is a lot to digest with so many characters operating at cross purposes including the equestrian center staff and members of the ownership family, a champion rider, a veterinarian, the horse owning clients, and committee members from the equestrian federation. Some characters get short shrift, like Toronto journalist Sue Parker who shows up investigating illegal practices in the international sale of sport horses. But this is ultimately Polo’s story and Kay wants us to consider the way his fractured personal history has affected his present and future. It is apparent that Polo is emblematic of our multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-faceted nation. He embodies multiple influences and loyalties that cannot easily be reconciled. In creating Polo, Kay has a point to make and she does is with nuance and grace: The key to personal reconciliation is found in family responsibility.

[Sacha Dmytruk · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a great read, I enjoyed it.

[Amber · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

I don't care for books by people who routinely deny the atrocities of the Holocaust and residential schools in a single breath.

https://twitter.com/BarbaraRKay/statu...

[Sawatis Frushell]

As far as saying Barbara Kay is a good writer, that is only opinion. Her latest article in the National Post is full of blatant contradiction. She obviously has no idea or concept of where "elected band leadership" came from. As she uses the words, a small band of unelected "leaders" and hysterically compares their dress, as tricked out antifa. (Masks) included.
Meanwhile, millions of square kilometers and (square miles) of "canada" remain Unceded territory.
Incidentally, the (Mohawk) flag that is seen in the picture of her article, that wrongly suggests that outsiders are interfering with Canadian politics and protocol, is a colonised illusion because when that flag originated, it was a symbol of unity.
Barbara Kay wouldn't know the difference between elected leaders or hereditary leaders, if her life actually depended on knowing the difference.

[Margaret Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 2015 tale of murder and intrigue most Machiavellian is set in a 1992 horse sport community of Quebec's Eastern Townships, just south of the island of Montreal. Although well-paced and chock full of fascinating details about not only horse sport, but also pre-1995 Referendum angst, the story reads a bit like reportage in that the f-stop on the narrator's lens is rather rigidly set at too great a distance for this reader's taste.