“Behind the glamorous exterior of horse racing lies the gritty reality of the backside”: a competitive world of owners, trainers, vets, jockeys, and other hangers-on. In this particular backside, someone is killing horses and demanding protection money.

That’s the premise of Bullet Work, although the title does not refer to the method of killing but to some sort of exercise with the horses. Oddly enough, the author explains just about everything else involved in the backside, but passes by the one mention of “bullet work” in the story without explanation.

Exercise riders had been given instructions for each mount, whether that was a canter just to stretch the legs, a two-minute mile clip, or a bullet work.

Nonetheless, I learned a great deal about racetracks and horse racing from Bullet Work. O’Brien manages to clarify most terms peculiar to that environment without being condescending to the reader.

If only that clarity had carried over to the plot. This book is not really a mystery because clues are not given to the reader; instead the story is just told. The climax occurs too early, and the follow-up death seemed gratuitous—at least not necessary to the advancement or completion of the plot.

In addition, the writing is choppy. It seems as if O’Brien had written each setting, action, or explanation in a number of different ways, and then simply strung them all together without integrating the thoughts. Moreover, the structure of most sentences is a basic subject-verb configuration that becomes overly repetitive and jerky. Although the writing is grammatically correct and mostly free of spelling & punctuation errors, it seems to suffer from a lack of good editing.

I thank Cadence Marketing Group for this copy of Bullet Work. Steve O’Brien is clearly familiar with the backside of horse racing. If that’s something you’d like to learn more about while being mildly entertained, pick up your own copy of Bullet Work.

Link for my Canadian readers:
Bullet Work