Fox tracks

While outside on Manhattan's Midtown streets a fierce snowstorm rages ferociously, nothing can dampen the excitement inside the elegant ballroom of Manhattan's Pierre Hotel. Hunt clubs from all over North America have gathered for their annual gala, and nobody is in higher spirits than Sister Jane, Master of the Jefferson Hunt in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Braving the foul weather, Sister and her boyfriend, Gray Lorillard, pop out to purchase cigars for the celebration at a nearby tobacco shop, finding themselves regaled by the colorful stories of its eccentric proprietor, Achilles Alonzo. Yet the trip's festive mood goes to ground the next morning with the grisly discovery of Alonzo's corpse. The tobacconist was shot in the head but found, oddly enough, with a cigarette pack of Smoky Mountain Smokes laid carefully over his heart. When a similar murder occurs in Washington, D.C., Sister's horse sense tells her there's a nefarious plot afoot, one that's winding its way from the South's aromatic tobacco farms to the wood-paneled boardrooms of power brokers hellbent on profit. When Sister voices her suspicions, she too becomes a target. Fortunately for her, the Master of the Jefferson Hunt may rely upon the wits and wiles of her four-legged friend--including horses Keepsake and Lafayette, and even the crabby fox Aunt Netty!

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.