Verity Verney: his wife, a reclusive Wiltshire landowner.

Carly Turner: animal-loving young mum, adjusting to village life and job juggling.

Ash Turner: her ex-soldier husband whose family rule the Orchard Estate.

Ellis, Sienna and baby Jackson: their three children.

Janine Turner: Ash’s older sister, queen of cleaning and nail art empires.

‘Social’ Norm: the emphysemic Turner family patriarch, a settled Romany.

Ink and Hardcase: Ash’s old school friends and drinking buddies.

Flynn the farrier: another childhood friend, the Bon Jovi of the anvil.

Skully: a wily operator and unofficial medicine man.

Auriol Bullock: battle-axe headmistress of Compton Magna Primary School.

Helen Beadle: divorce lawyer and sharp-minded chairman of the school’s PTA.

Bridget Mazur: Belfast-born member of the village’s Saddle Bags, a hipster young mum married to volatile Polish builder, Aleš.

Flavia and Zak: their two young children.

Petra Gunn: historical novelist and neglected wife, founder of the Saddle Bags whose gossipy hacks keep her sane.

Gill Walcote: straight-talking member of the Saddle Bags who runs a local veterinary practice with Kiwi husband.

Mo Dawkins: the jolliest of the Saddle Bags, a tirelessly hardworking farmer’s daughter.

Bay Austen: dashing agricultural entrepreneur, hunt thruster and serial flirt.

Monique Austen: his steely Dutch wife.

Suzy ‘Sous Vide’ David: an on-trend schleb chef and new proprietor of The Jugged Hare.

Animals

Beck: an explosive warmblood stallion, once Germany’s hotly-tipped new star, as stunning as he is screwed up.

Cruisoe: the stud’s foundation stallion whose winning progeny inherit his lion heart.

Spirit: a wall-eyed colt with a big man attitude and a bright future.

The stud’s broodmares: an opinionated bunch of matriarchs.

Craic: Bridge’s nervouscited Connemara pony.

The Redhead: Petra’s rabble-rousing mare.

Coll: her sidekick, a brutish greedy Shetland.

Lester’s cob: as mannerly and well-turned-out as its rider.

Olive and Enid: Ronnie’s sprightly little Lancashire Heelers, a squabbling mother and daughter.

Stubbs: Lester’s unswervingly loyal fox terrier.

Knott: Pax’s cautious deerhound puppy.

Pricey: a bull lurcher bred for coursing.

Laurence: a rescued fox cub.

Barista and Jam: the Mazurs’ cats.

Prologue

2012

Fresh from the deep freeze, the vodka bottle opened with a satisfying crack of metal seal and a vaporous curl of condensing air.

If Luca had come to work in the Middle East with the intention of sobering up, he wasn’t doing a very good job. In the eight weeks he’d been here, he’d barely seen the wagon amid all the chauffeur-driven luxury and million-dollar horseflesh, let alone got on it. All the westerners he’d got to know – and there were many on the showjumping circuit – drank like fish behind closed doors. A man with a habit and a broken heart could only swim against the tide for so long in a dry country.

The frozen vodka poured thick as oil, the toxic nectar which had made his host country among the wealthiest horse-loving nations.

‘Skål!’

‘Sláinte.’ Luca tipped his glass against that of his companion, a pretty Swedish event rider called Signe who he knew vaguely from the European circuit, also attracted by the heat and money. Like him she was a work rider, hired to mentor a young member of the extended royal family – in her case their boss’s oldest granddaughter, a teenage princess with her ambitions set on being the first Arab winner of Badminton. Today she’d told Signe that the world’s biggest pop pin-up, a snake-hipped American youth with twenty million Twitter followers, had been booked by her indulgent grandfather to sing at her sixteenth birthday party, his fee big enough to buy a superyacht for every day of the week.