Mark Winslow

The past comes rearing up to bite the next generation when a son digs too deep into his family's past.... Martin Firestone can't figure why his father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school. Then, Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict, black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents-all in a day's work for Samuel Firestone, M.D. When Leo decided his father was covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony, followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old heads, it was too late to call off the investigation. But there are loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for.

Irreverent Chicago racetrack publicist Jack Doyle, former advertising man and amateur boxer, accepts a new job as a thoroughbred jockey's agent. His client is a seventeen-year-old riding phenom from Ireland named Mickey Sheehan. Mickey and Jack prove to be an effective team until someone begins secretly doping the horses, affecting race results. In his quest to identify the culprit, Doyle is aided by his old friend Moe Kellman, furrier-to-the-Mob; trainer Ralph Tenuta, himself the target of a blackmailer; and young veterinarian Ingrid McGuire, a talented horse communicator. The action moves from Chicago's Heartland Downs to New York's famed Saratoga Race Course, even stepping aboard Mob capo Fifi Bonadio's lavish yacht in Chicago's Belmont Harbor. Will Jack's persistent push for answers get him killed?