Twenty-eight horses. One deadly fire. A racetrack hiding secrets.When a late night blaze destroys Barn 7 at Liberty Racetrack, killing twenty eight prized Standardbred horses, authorities rule it arson. Insurance investigator Callie Oaks knows the fire wasn’t random. Raised in the harness racing world, Callie goes undercover at the track, posing as an exercise driver to investigate suspicious insurance claims. As she digs into the tight knit backstretch community, she uncovers secrets worth killing for. From the author of “Silver Charm,” “The Sand Pounder,” “Pinto,” and “The Stallion and His Peculiar Boy.”
Perfect for readers who love:
Horse racing mysteries
Arson investigations
Small-town crime fiction
Female amateur sleuth / insurance investigator thrillers
Suspense with authentic equestrian detail
Fire at the Track is a fast-paced mystery thriller packed with insider racing drama, financial deception, and high-stakes suspense.
I've spent most of my life around horses, so when I sat down to write Fire at the Track, the first book in my new Harness Racing Mystery series, I already knew the setting I wanted. What I didn't expect was how few people had gotten there before me.
Mystery readers have no shortage of options if they love the racetrack. Thoroughbred racing has been mined for decades — Dick Francis alone built a career on it. But harness racing, with its Standardbreds, its sulkies, and that distinctive lateral gait that looks nothing like a normal trot or gallop, has stayed almost entirely off the page. That gap is what pulled me in. I wanted to write for readers who already love a good cozy mystery, but give them a backstretch they've never walked before — the fog over a limestone track at dawn, the particular camaraderie of a barn family, the split-second calculations a driver makes at forty miles an hour with no seatbelt and no roof.
The story itself started with something much darker than a track record. On July 6, 2001, a fire at the Meadows Harness Racing Track in Washington, Pennsylvania, killed twenty-eight horses. The cause was never determined. More than twenty years later, in November 2023, another barn fire — this one at Tioga Downs in New York — killed thirty horses and a cat. A man was eventually convicted of arson, but his motive was never made clear. Both tragedies stayed with me long after I read about them, and eventually they became the backdrop for a story that is entirely fictional, but that I hope honors what was lost in those real fires.
Out of that came Callie Oaks, a former insurance investigator who goes undercover at the fictional Liberty Racetrack to find out who set a fire that killed twenty-eight horses — and who quickly realizes that the person responsible is still very much on the grounds, watching her get closer. I wanted a protagonist who wasn't a horsewoman pretending to investigate, but an investigator who had to earn her place among horsewomen. That distinction mattered to me. Trust in a barn is built in very small increments — the way you handle a lead rope, whether you show up before the sun does, whether a nervous horse decides to lean into your shoulder instead of away from it. Callie has to earn all of that while also trying to catch someone who is willing to kill again.
Readers of my earlier books — Silver Charm, Finding Fionn, The Stallion and His Peculiar Boy, The Sand Pounder, and Coal Dust and Dreams — know that horses have never been set dressing in my stories. They're characters in their own right, with their own instincts and their own say in how a scene plays out. That didn't change just because I moved from character-driven equestrian fiction into mystery. If anything, harness racing gave me an even richer world to draw from — the syndication deals, the barn politics, the backstretch bookies, the blood testing before a big race. It's a community with real stakes, real money, and real danger, and very few outsiders ever get to see how it actually works.
Fire at the Track is the beginning of a series I'm genuinely excited to keep building. Book two, Murder in the Winner's Circle, follows Callie into a case involving a poisoning at a birthday celebration and a gold mine embezzlement scheme, and a third book is already taking shape. I hope you'll saddle up and join Callie at Liberty Racetrack — and that by the end, you'll understand a little of why I fell in love with this world enough to build a mystery series around it.
Fire at the Track is available now from Dancing Horse Press.
M.J. Evans is the award-winning author of twenty six published works spanning middle-grade, young adult, and adult fiction, as well as a selection of picture books. Her writing often explores themes centered around horses and equine fantasy, reflecting a lifelong passion for these remarkable animals. A graduate of Oregon State University and a former educator with experience teaching both middle and high school students, Ms. Evans brings both educational insight and storytelling flair to her work. She resides in beautiful Colorado with her husband, Tom, where they enjoy the company of their horses and Standard Poodle. She is the proud mother of five and grandmother of thirteen.M.J. Evans was the recipient of the 2024 Colorado Authors League Lifetime Achievement Award.
Literary awards include: Chanticleer International Book Awards Readers’ Favorite International Awards Eric Hoffer Awards Nautilus Awards Literary Classics awards Literary Global Book Awards Feathered Quill Book Awards Purple Dragonfly Awards Royal Dragonfly Awards Page Turner Award Next Generation Award Global Book Awards CIPA Evvy Book Awards Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards Incipere Book Awards International Impact Book Awards Maincrest Media Book Awards Book Excellence Awards Mom’s Choice Awards
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