Lots of horses, lots of ridiculously good-looking, very wealthy, connected people, literally dozens and dozens of characters, lots of sex, and cute sleepy English villages. I read some bad reviews of this one, but since I wasn’t impressed with the last of the series I’d read (The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous), I thoroughly enjoyed this. It was still good fun, I was still rooting for our heroines and horses, and I still love Jilly Cooper. To read one of Cooper’s books is to escape into an alternative universe in which all is right with the world.

As did the scene where the elderly Major snuck into a hotel room and took advantage of a very drunk actress, who mistakenly assumed in the dark that he was her partner. Only through sheer determination and constant complaining did I finish this diabolical excuse for a book! As always with Jilly's books, you get drawn in completely to her world, engaging with and caring about the characters (and awaiting the villains getting their comeuppance). Can she be the first mare in over fifty years, and Amber the first woman ever, to win this mighty race?When her bullying husband dies, Etta’s selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset home to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood. At her best, Jilly Cooper has a genius for combining soft-focus romance with the beady, pitiless social comedy of Jane Austen, or at least Nancy Mitford. After a nail-biting court case, Mrs Wilkinson is awarded to Etta, thus ensuring the lasting and vengeful enmity of her evil former trainer and owner.

I'm sad to say I've tried to force my way onwards, hoping for a glimpse of RC-B but I'm abandoning it at less than 50% still disappointed. Plenty of old favourites, like Rupert Campbell-Black, along with a whole new village of characters to fall in love with. A village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training, consisting of a riotous mix of local characters, who set off to the races in a minibus clanking with bottles. For example, in The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, we have the launch party, a kitchen visit, a school function, and a dinner party to impart information. The story of Etta, put-upon widow and grandmother, whose generosity of spirit was abused by her domineering (wealthy) husband who left her at the mercy of her uncaring, grasping children due to the terms of his will.I felt fairly uncomfortable as well with some of the work that Jilly did involving Pakistanis and Al Qaeda (I will leave you to wonder how she encompassed this into the world of jump racing! Not to mention I found it hard going remembering who was who, who was married to who, who was sleeping with who, currently and previously, who hated who etc etc! It's no coincidence that there was a racing scene in My Fair Lady; the track has always been a place of social as well as equine movement, where fortunes are made and the nouveaux riches negotiate their perilous ascent up the class ladder.