The Blind Switch was a perfect choice for my vacation reading material. Reading is one of my great selfish pleasures—one that I don’t indulge in often enough. A great book can take me away from the stress and tedious details of daily life. While I love learning and enjoy my non-fiction too, this book goes under the “just for fun” category, for that mental escape that we all need sometimes. While I’m not usually a huge fan of the mystery genre, this book pulled me in from the beginning, and had me hooked with the intriguing twists and turns and multi-dimensional characters. The vivid descriptions made me feel like I was in the middle of the action–a clear sign of a well crafted story.
Here’s the basic plot from the Amazon synopsis: Ruby Sans’ world is turned upside down when she discovers she is the sole living heir of an estranged aunt. Overnight, Ruby inherits a rare green diamond and finds herself a co-owner of a racehorse with an intriguing trainer carrying a shadowy past. As Ruby digs deeper into her new horse’s stats and his trainer’s track record, she soon discovers that she is in a race jockeying to find her best friend’s killer while uncovering the secret behind a slew of suspicious racehorse deaths.
Author Kelley Sewell does a great job of weaving in details and facts about horse racing and gemstones while creating colorful and memorable characters. I always enjoy a book more if I can learn something from it, and while this wasn’t a piece of historical fiction or anything, I did learn a bit about the world of horse racing including what the term “blind switch” means. And who knew there was such a thing as green diamonds? Not me!
So aiming for full disclosure here, Kelley was a co-worker of mine at NorthBay Healthcare for quite a few years, but we had both moved on to other opportunities and lost touch. I had no idea she had written a book until I bumped into her as we were both leaving a Brandon Burchard event in San Jose. One of those small world days! So she told me the story of how she had this story in her head with plans for writing this book for the last 25 years since graduating college with a degree in English. As it often does, life got in the way of her writing with a different career path, marriage, kids, and general business. It took a chance meeting with a publisher (at another Brandon Burchard event) to get her a book deal, and get the story out of her head and onto the pages of her first novel. Of course after hearing Kelley’s story I had to immediately purchase and read the book, and I’m so glad I did! It’s an imaginative plot with characters you want to get to know better.
For days after I finished the book, Ruby Sans stayed in my mind… like she was an acquaintance rather than a character in a fictional piece of work. While the Blind Switch mystery is solved in a satisfying way, it leaves the reader wondering where life will take the heroine next. The story ends with hints of another adventure for Ruby Sans, so we hope to see another book from Kelley soon.
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