Review: Driving me crazy -  small spoiler alert
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2012
I read the first Merry Abbott mystery by Carolyn McSparren, and enjoyed it.  It was a light read, and I really liked the lead character and the setting - how often do you find a mystery set in the world of carriage driving?I thought this novel had a better plot and faster pacing than the first.  Merry is unlucky enough to find the most loathsome person she knows murdered at a horse show.  For a brief time she is under suspicion, but the murdered man has a long list of people who may have wanted him dead, and so the investigators have their work cut out for them.  Merry again has to deal with her feelings for Agent Wheeler, while an unknown criminal seems to be willing to go to extreme lengths for reasons that do not become apparent until near the end of the book.  As with the first book a little closer editing would have been nice, but overall it would have been a pleasant fun mystery if it had not been for my two major reservations outlined below.Two scenes in this novel drove me crazy.  Firstly, a driven pony spooks and attempts to jump out of an arena.  The pony gets hung up on a fence,  and apparently neither pony, groom or the disabled driver are hurt.  However, even if the pony was sound as a bell, and not sprained, cut or bruised (which is pretty unlikely), it would be unthinkable to allow the pony to enter a contest just a few hours later with the same disabled driver.  Having driven myself and assisted with disabled drivers, I can't see this as a circumstance that would ever be allowed in the real world.  Maybe this would go unnoticed by non-horsey readers, but I could not believe this scene actually made it into a book where normally the horse details are pretty factual.The second scene is one that surely any reader of mysteries would be shaking their heads over.  After a shooting at the same horse show, the authorities drive off with their perpetrator safely under wraps.  But they do not declare the horse show a crime scene,  they don't take witness statements, and despite the shooting the competition goes on as if nothing much had happened. Now maybe shootings at horse shows are so commonplace in that part of the world that everyone just shrugs it off and has a good laugh and goes on their merry way, even the police, but unless this is actually set in a parallel universe I really doubt it.  I was very disappointed that these two scenes spoiled an otherwise fun read.