Nice Fillies Finish Last by Brett HallidayMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
When teh man who gave him a tip on a horse winds up dead, Michael Shayne's reporter friend Tim Rourke goes snooping around the track, looking for answers. When Rourke winds up in the hospital, Shayne takes the case and finds out the world of horse racing is more deadly than he ever imagined...
The more of the Mike Shayne's I read, the more convinced I am that I shouldn't read any of them after Davis Dresser left the Brett Halliday pseudonym to other writers.
Nice Fillies Finish Last has a lot in common with the other post-Dresser Mike Shayne book I've read, Fourth Down to Death. There's the same rape-y subtext, the same cardboard female characters, and the same superhero Mike Shayne.
Much like Fourth Down to Death, the plot was unnecessarily complex and also so tied to betting on horseracing that it was very inaccessible in some places to someone with only a rudimentary knowledge of horseracing and the gambling on thereof.
There were some interesting moments but they were few and far between. My impatience got the better of me in the last fifty pages and I started skimming. Shayne pretty much walks around, has women fall for him, and beats up on bad guys. He's like Mike Hammer, only with a car phone. To top it off, Shayne was barely in the first 60 pages.
While I didn't outright hate this book, I wouldn't recommend it. Read at your own risk.
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