Jill Hand

The Blue Horse Jill Hand

Fact mixes with fantasy as a hairless blue horse discovered in South Africa in 1860, grazing with a herd of zebra, becomes the object of a quest by a trio of unlikely time travelers. Rosina, an intrepid Victorian young lady, her fiance, Ned York, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London by his uncle, Richard III, and the irascible Olga from Czarist Russia must work together to obtain the horse from its owner, an amiable but none-too-bright English peer who has scandalized his neighbors by marrying a circus bareback rider. Along the way are visits to two bizarre fin de siecle Paris nightclubs and an encounter with a talking brass head who tells the worst ghost stories you have ever heard. There's also a demanding, narcissistic twenty-fourth-century celebrity who wants to make a troupe of convincing-looking fairies appear to Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Rosina encounters an unexpected person on her trip to the past to obtain the blue horse: Her father. He's only nineteen and has no idea who she is. Should she warn him of the railway accident that will kill him twenty-six years in the future and lead to her becoming a time traveler? Complicating things further is a shady character claiming to be an American millionaire who wants the blue horse for reasons of his own.