CRAZY LIKE A FOX

4 stars out of 5

When I opened this book on my Kindle, I was eager to start my first by this author even though it's not in the Sneaky Pie Brown cat series I've been wanting to sample for quite some time now. But when this one began with a lengthy list of character descriptions - not just of people, but hounds and foxes - my heart sank a little. I'm not young any more, and my short-term memory isn't even close to what it used to be. How on earth, I said to myself, will I ever keep all of them straight?

And at first, that really was an issue; flipping back and forth to the lists to jog my failing memory would have taken too much time and distracted me from the story (it probably would be easier on a "real" book, though I wouldn't have wanted to do it there, either) - so for the first several chapters I felt more than a bit lost. That the switch from people talking to animals talking isn't clearly delineated made it even more difficult; I'd be halfway down a page before realizing that the conversation I'd just read was between a couple of pooches or owls, not people.

The story, though, not only is well crafted but interesting to me because I know (make that knew) next to nothing about fox hunting. An extensive glossary of terms at the beginning was helpful, but then again, I forgot most of the definitions once the story got going. But I decided to forge ahead and not worry that I couldn't always remember who's who and what's what. And by golly,  I'm glad I did. Not only did I learn that the state of Virginia is a hotbed of fox-hunting activity (I thought it to be a sport in which only the English partake), but the intricate plot caught me up in intrigue and the thrill of the chases as well as perspectives on topical issues such as race relations, politics and drugs. There was humor as well; consider, for instance, this description of a particularly talented cat:

"Her marvelous ears could hear a rat piss in cotton."

Now about that story: Around 1954 - the year I was 13, in case anyone thinks I was lying about being old - an accomplished fox huntsman and noted ladies man named Wesley Carruthers (better known as Weevil) disappeared, never to be found. Rumored to have stolen valuable jewelry from one of his also-rumored lovers, it was assumed that he'd been murdered even though his body never turned up. Fast forward 60 years to a museum near the Jefferson Hunt Club in rural Virginia, when an etched cow horn goes missing from a display case and someone "sees" Weevil at the scene. When his distinctive horn echoes at a hunt, all kinds of questions emerge - not the least of which is whether or not ghosts really exist.

Along the way, readers meet a cast of colorful characters like "Sister" Jane Arnold, master of the hunt club; Tootie, a young heiress who gave up on a prestigious college education (and was disowned by her richer-than-God father) to find her true calling working with hounds and horses at the club; and Yvonne, Tootie's former supermodel mother, who's in the midst of dumping her cheating husband and hoping to make a new life near her daughter. 

But the overriding issue, so to speak, is Weevil: Who is he, really, and why has he come back? While I correctly guessed the who part fairly early on, the why eluded me until all the details were wrapped up cleverly at the conclusion. My own conclusion? Well done! And many thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Crazy Like a Fox by Rita Mae Brown (Ballantine Books, October 2017); 305 pp.