Spur Award-Winning Author
ED GORMAN 

In this race, someone is about to finish dead last…  

Secret Service Agent Dev Mallory didn't get to be the best playing by the rules. He's trained to kill, but only as a last resort. And in his new mission, survival means beat­ing the odds...  

In rough-and-tumble Corvair, California, the only rule is that there are no rules. So where better to hold a horse race offering the biggest purse in the history of the sport?  

Dev could think of a few places, if he wasn't already assigned to protect a priceless Thoroughbred entering the race. There've been too many murders over allegedly fixed races at this track. And now there's too much money on the line for the U.S. government to take any chances on "poor sportsmanship" getting out of hand. 

But before Dev even gets to Corvair, his beautiful partner, Tess O'Neill, is shanghaied off the train right under his nose—and Dev finds himself thrown into a winner-takes-all race to save her and to uncover a conspiracy of mur­der in which all bets are off... 

Praise for the novels of Ed Gorman  

"Highly entertaining."
—Los Angeles Times 

"A lean, hardboiled style."
—Publishers Weekly