What do you do when everything you've held to be true, when your entire life, in fact, turns out to be a lie? Do you run away? Start over? Create a new truth? This is the dilemma faced by what twenty-two-year old Stephen Cline. Bruised in body and psyche from his adventures in At Risk, Steve gets another blow in Dead Man's Touch, the sudden death of his estranged father in an automobile accident. At the funeral, Steve's disgruntled older brother calls him a bastard--and means it. Literally. Steve, he reveals, is the product of an affair. Confronting his socialite mother, Steve learns that his real father is a horse trainer, Christopher J. Kessler.

Curiosity gets the best of Steve, who's on leave from his job at Foxdale stables, so he heads for the Maryland track where he can find Kessler. The trainer soon notices that Steve is shadowing him and accuses Steve of working for a group of men intent on pressuring him to throw select races in a lucrative race-fixing scam. When Kessler learns that he's a father and Steve is his son, he recruits Steve to work undercover at his training barn to thwart the fix by discovering who's been doping the most promising horses.

As Steve settles in, he gets caught up in the unique lifestyle inherent to the backside. Everyone who works there lives and breathes it--the hopes and the dreams along with the shattering disappointments--until the work itself becomes a way of life. For a man recovering his health, and his courage after an earlier brush with the kind of toughs who can make a life with horses a nightmare, the backside is an inspiration.

But it is not a life without peril—some men are willing to do anything to get the right horse under the wire first. Anything from threats to violence to murder. As Steve puts pressure on the bad guys, a young woman is found dead in a horse's stall, and Steve becomes the prime suspect in her murder. He must now discover the ringleader's identity to keep from being put in jail, or worse, in the ground.

"The smart money could make the unusually likable protagonist a favorite in the Francis Stakes" said Kirkus Reviews of Steve Cline's first appearance in 2002's At Risk, the start of a promising career for him and for author Kit Ehrman. Publishers Weekly adds: "Both horse lovers and crime fans who've never stepped into a stirrup will relish Ehrman's riveting debut."

Reviews

If horses and the care and racing of same occupy a sizable part of your

interest, you'll be glad to hear that Kit Ehrman, who gave us the well-received "At Risk," has produced a second solid, diverting and apparently authentic equine mystery... Ehrman does a fine, spare job... Along the way we get enough details of the hard, smelly, underpaid life in that part of racing called--not without humor--the backside to make up for several screenings of "Seabiscuit." -- Chicago Tribune

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"Dick Francis fans rejoice. America now has its own version of stories about the horse-racing world and

the people populating it.... Kit Ehrman has created a driven, principled character and puts him into situations where he must fight for the moral high ground.... Readers who love the excitement of the race will be thrilled with the arrival of this new addition to the field of mystery fiction." -The Denver Post

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"Kit Ehrman has a unique voice that makes Dead Man's Touch an exciting amateur sleuth tale. The protagonist, rather young in physical years, has experienced so much that he comes across as a mature person, so familiar with death that he realizes it can strike without warning at any time. There is a lot of action in this straightforward mystery, much of it dealing with a protagonist who refuses to stay down after being threatened and battered. Dead Man's Touch is as good as the works of Dick Francis." –Harriet Klausner, I Love a Mystery

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"Still recovering from the physical and psychological bruises he received in his first outing, At Risk (2002), 22-year-old Steve Cline, barn manager of a Maryland horse farm, faces more trauma when his estranged father dies in a car accident in this chilling sequel from Ehrman.... From the labor-intensive work in the oppressive heat of a Maryland summer to the cockroach-infested living quarters of the help, Ehrman creates an authentic and vivid picture of the reality behind the glamour of the races.... with its sensitively drawn characters and enchanting horses with unique personalities, this is sure to be a contender for the winner's circle." -–Publishers Weekly

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Hidden away from the glittering stage of thoroughbred racing, with its flashing silks and gleaming horseflesh, is a place they call "the backside." In her second stable mystery, DEAD MAN'S TOUCH (Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95), Kit Ehrman refers to this behind-the-scenes area -- where trainers, grooms, barn managers and stable hands minister around the clock to the needs of their high-strung charges -- as "a world unto itself." Ehrman, who has worked at show barns and breeding farms, strikes a solid claim to this gritty territory with another heels-up thriller that takes up where Dick Francis left off. In the barn.

Steve Cline, the young stable hand who made such a strong and sympathetic hero in ''At Risk,'' searches out the father he never knew, a thoroughbred trainer at a Maryland racetrack, and signs on as a ''hot-walker,'' a lowly exercise worker, when he discovers that someone has been fixing races by tampering with his father's horses. In true Francis tradition, Steve takes plenty of physical punishment as a sleuth. But his undercover role also gives him the inside track on life as it's lived on the backside, a grueling, even squalid existence that pays off in the chance to get close to the magnificent animals that have more character and heart than the two-footed fools who view them as a commodity.

--Marilyn Stasio, NY Times