Mount!: The fast-paced, riotous new adventure from the Sunday Times bestselling author Jilly Cooper

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I also think that Jilly's extreme cleverness and powers of observation have outed themselves surreptitiously in the plot, if not the gush.

There's a scene which doesn't happen which I was surprised at (a particular race) but the book was so long by this point that I can see why Cooper chose another denouement. In the final words of Jilly: "They always said the best way to get over someone was to get under someone else. Luckily, the fort at home is held by Rupert's assistant Gav, a genius with horses, fancied by every stable lass, but damaged by alcoholism and a vile wife.The national /racial /xenophobic stereotypes are getting ever more cringe worthy and if you're female you've still got to loose weight to get your man. I know Jilly's getting older but someone should have pointed things out to her so she could have corrected it.

It is a sport new to her, and she has loaded this novel with all of the detail that she had learned to fictionalize the hustling of horses and jockeys, owners and trainers in this high octane and monied world. Luckily, the fort at home is held by Rupert’s assistant Gav, a genius with horses, fancied by every stable lass, but damaged by alcoholism and a vile wife. In previous books when he cheated on his first wife Helen I was routing for him because she was a truly awful woman.The competition to win the Leading Sire award lasted the entire book, and had lots of unexpected twists and turns. Sure, Cooper is a product of a particular time period, but surely her editor could have remarked on the fact that writing out Chinese use of 'r' instead of 'l' in dialogue isn't poking fun, but is actually racist. No, Gala is not a very sympathetic character and the complete about turn of love life at the end of the book in the space of a page was a bit of a shocker and deeply unlikely.

Oh, really, who cares: there are doggies and horsies in it, and poor old Taggie stuck in the kitchen for 900 years as usual; wonderful parties, like Cosmo Rannaldini’s chess ball, where everyone turns up as a “porn”. As for Jan, it’s obvious from the off that he is the one causing problems and sabotaging everything and also trying to steal Taggie. Perhaps she should have walked out, which would have devastated Rupert and he would have dropped everything to get her back. He longs to trounce Roberto’s Revenge, the stallion owned by his detested rival Cosmo Rannaldini, which means abandoning his racing empire at Penscombe and his darling wife Taggie, and chasing winners in the richest races worldwide, from Dubai to Los Angeles to Melbourne. It's like Jilly is running out of ideas for characters in her books, so just taking the old ones and giving them new names and voila!It's truly dreadful, could have been half the size if Jilly hadn't spent so much time summarising events and relationships from previous RCB novels. There is a name that Rupert uses to describe a woman's private parts which I would like to never see again in my life because. The stable hands are treated in an awful way with girls made out to be sluts with nicknames like ‘Lou-easy’ and the boys are treated like studs competing on who can lay the most women. In Cooper’s latest blockbuster—again set in the horse-racing world—it’s certainly not difficult to tell what she thinks of any of the characters.