I found Cactus Jack to be a classic rags to riches horse racing novel.
Will Cactus Jack rise to the occasion? Or will Ryker get his way and claim the horse? With everything against them our crew are determined to rise to the top. So Billie and her horse, along with a cast of odd bods, take on the establishment, with no money and very little hope. When billionaire businessman Reese Ryker offers her a good price she almost takes it, then she learns of Ryker's obsession with her father's unraced colt, Cactus Jack. Inheriting his run down Kentucky horse farm, and the debts with it, Billie's first instinct is to sell everything. Assisted by a team of misfits, including a washed-up trainer with whom she has a bit too much history, the horse-crazy little girl next door, and her father’s ex-girlfriend, Billie and Cactus Jack take the track by a storm.īillie Masterson is a down on her luck waitress with a drop kick boyfriend, when she learns of the death of her estranged father. To do that she needs to race the animal-and beat Ryker at his own game. Against her better judgment, she decides to keep the farm and the untested horse.
Billie is willing to sell everything to Ryker-until she realizes that he’s an entitled misogynist and a not-so-subtle racist. Determined to sell everything, settle the debts and get out of town, Billie discovers that her father’s colt, a horse named Cactus Jack, is the object of obsession for billionaire Reese Ryker, the louche scion of a department store dynasty and now owner of Double R Racing, one of the top thoroughbred stables in the world. However, she’s informed by her father’s lawyer, the garrulous David Mountain Clay, that she now owns the farm…and all the debt that goes with it. When Will drops dead while working on the farm, Billie returns to rural Kentucky for the funeral, intending only to pay her respects before high-tailing it back to Ohio.
Her mother committed suicide when Billie was a teen and she blames her father, Will Masterson. She hasn’t been home to the family’s broken-down thoroughbred farm in Kentucky since college. His latest novel, f or fans of Richard Russo and Jane Smiley, is a terrific novel about a thirty-something single woman, the untried colt she inherits, a horse crazy little girl, and their band of misfits and has-beens who stick it to the establishment in the cutthroat world of horse racing.īillie Masterson is a thirty-something chronic underachiever, drowning herself in alcohol and bad relationships in Ohio. Brad Smith “rivals Elmore Leonard at his best” ( Publishers Weekly).
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