Although this seems to be a lot of the action, it is all really premise and explained in the first couple of chapters. Horses and horsemanship were the Ashby family trade and helped him to be accepted, and Brat finds himself liking Bee, his 'aunt' and Eleanor, his 'sister'. They all did as she requested—except for one man who peeped at her through a gap in his shutters, and that's where the expression 'Peeping Tom' is said to come from.

Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot.The Ashbys are wealthy by other means with no money problems and so do not need to raise horses, the impostor who plays Tony is not a long-lost cousin and the character of Uncle Charles does not appear. It turned out to be a real page turner, so well written that I was wishing for it to go for at least another 300 pages. Carole Boyd's narration of this splendid mystery made it a must read--even though I had read it when I was much, much younger and could remember the plot. he could not have known until the actual face-face-face meeting that Brat was not his brother … he had remembered that odd relaxing on Simon’s part the moment he had a good look at himself.

As Tey works her ingenious way through her story, the suspense of the crime plot becomes less interesting than the emotional and moral puzzle she’s created. Eight years before the story begins, fourteen year old Patrick Ashby disappeared and was presumed to be dead,. He ended up in the western US, where he worked at ranches and stables for several years and became an expert horseman, until a fall injured his leg, leaving him with a limp. I actually put the book down after I had to stop the first time, and only picked it up about two days later.Brat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. Perhaps the most interesting character is that christened ‘Timber the murder horse’ by my book group – he has killed a man by smacking him into a tree, and his one wish in life is to do it more people. Comments that contribute civilly and constructively to discussion of the topics raised on this blog, from any point of view, are welcome. In fact her narrative is so dialogue-driven that her protagonist often has spirited and convincing exchanges with his inner self. Alec's idea is for Brat to impersonate Simon's missing twin, Patrick, and, as the elder brother, claim the trust and the estate.