Simpatico's Gift

The Kent Stephenson Thriller Series

The series centers around Doctor Kent Stephenson, a reclusive veterinarian in a small Upstate New York town. Despite his best efforts to avoid entanglements with his clients and patients, he is inevitably drawn into cases of murder and other mayhem that threaten the people around him and beyond. A reluctant hero, Kent is quiet, even somewhat bashful, but when cornered and the stakes are high, he fights like a rottweiler. He and his companion, a dog named Lucinda, risk their lives to unravel each crime, to which there is always more than initially appears, and bring justice. Currently there are three books in the series.

Simpatico's Gift     Book #2 in the Kent Stephenson Series

It's the middle of the breeding season in Upstate New York, and the top stallions in Kent Stephenson's veterinary practice are being systematically eliminated by sudden death, rare disease, and mysterious disappearance. Kent, his Redbone hound, Lucinda, and his teenage daughter, Emily, put their lives on the line to find out why. Their investigation leads them from horseracing's seedy underbelly of fixes and doping, to the staid aristocracy of Kentucky's famed bluegrass horse farms, struggling to keep their legacy of great stallions. Then they descend into the world of a super-rich, South American drug lord, who collects horses the way he collects beautiful women. It's a race to the wire as they jockey to keep themselves alive, save the stallions, and stop whoever is behind it all. What they discover rocks the horse industry. And it will rock the very soul of any lover of these great beasts.

Frank Martorana has been the "family doctor" for countless horses, cows, dogs, cats, and other creatures around Central New York. When he is not treating animals, he is hard at work readying the next book in the Kent Stephenson series, fly fishing in the Adirondacks, or making wine.