1922. The American racetrack: a world of dust, cash, and dreams where fortunes rise and collapse in the stretch. Hugh S. Fullerton, the legendary sportswriter who helped expose the Black Sox scandal, brings his journalist's eye and a novelist's heart to this collection of racing stories. Here you'll find Hardshell Gaines, an honest man with empty pockets and a stallion named to carry his last hope, and Jaundice O'Keefe, a once-celebrated jockey now drowning in vice. These are the men and women who live and die by the tote board: trainers with their secrets, gamblers with their systems, owners with their blind faith. Fullerton writes with the hard-won knowledge of someone who walked the backside of tracks and knew these people by name. The prose crackles with the specific gravity of a world that ran on blood, money, and longing. This isn't nostalgic equestrian romance. It's something rawer: a portrait of American ambition at its most desperate and alive, where a horse's nose at the wire can mean salvation or ruin.
