Blood in the Bluegrass
“Action packed from the get-go and filled with unique characters, the book is hard to put down as it races headlong at full speed to the finish line.”
Barry Irwin, Founder/CEO Team Valor International
Harper had put the past behind her. Or so she thought. Fleeing the flashy, high dollar world of Kentucky horse racing for NYC, she'd been content living the life of a successful painter. But escape isn't an option after the accidental death of her sister sends her back to the Bluegrass, a horse racing world filled with hope and heartbreak. As the body count rises as Eden Hill, Harper becomes convinced her sister's death was no accident. Probing more deeply, Harper realizes Paris' death is tied to a dark and deadly secret, one she discovers is why her racehorses are dying. Solving her sister's murder and saving her family's stud farm will take every ounce of Harper's wit and courage.
When seven skeletons are discovered on the grounds, and the barn with her best Kentucky Derby prospects is set on fire, Harper bears down to find the killer. The problem is, the culprit could be anyone: Is it JD, her childhood sweetheart, Marshall, their long-time trainer, or is it their nasty neighbor Red Cole, in partnership with her family for generations?
Someone is on a killing spree, and though Harper doesn't know why, she is sure of one thing--the murderer is someone she's known and trusted her whole life.
The Lost Ode
Amazing read. Quite the page turner. While a great murder mystery, The Lost Ode, is also steeped in landmarks and culture of the area as well as an in depth knowledge of the thoroughbred horse industry.
Literary scholar and amateur sleuth, Julia, has stumbled on a family secret . . . a secret steeped in the history of Kentucky’s thoroughbred country and linked to the descendants of poet John Keats and his brother George. When the owner of Brookfield Stud, Gray Burke, is arrested for homicide, Julia is left to solve the murder and prove his innocence while following the trail to the Keats’s lost fortune.
Solving the murder may lead to love and treasure, but has Julia back the wrong horse in believing Gray Burke’s innocence?
Many Brave Hearts: A Memoir
“Many Brave Hearts is an unblinking, eloquent, deeply felt account of how war can shatter emotional lives and undermine our deepest bonds. Virginia Slachman has documented for us the story, not only of her family and its slow disintegration over the years, but a narrative powerfully representative of a collective American experience. In highly accomplished, skillful prose the book offers readers a fascinating double-narrative that enhances and illuminates both. Father and daughter speak not so much to each other as to their common experience and grief. It is a beautiful and devastating testament and it is redeemed, in the only way possible, with ultimate understanding and love.”
Kurt Brown
World of Mortal Light
In his “Ars Poetica,” Czeslaw Milosz aspires to “a more spacious form . . . free from the claims of poetry or prose.” This is the liberated, indeterminate space Virginia Slachman’s words inhabit in this uncommon book of humble devotions and enchantments fringed with dread. Situated somewhere at the edge of the here-world and the there-world, the poet notes “many darknesses are separating themselves” as she registers and grapples with the various signs of light. Slachman creates an atmosphere of irreality populated with real-world things, where cool detachment betrays ancient ache, lyricism mates with philosophy, and the future is unsteady as memory. What we can count on in this ultimately edifying journey is Slachman’s tough humanity, and her naming for us of those hard-to-reach places, where we might have stumbled trying to return on our own. Yahia Lababidi, "The Artist as Mystic" In her new book, World of Mortal Light, Virginia Slachman suggests that the art of poetry is “a thing made of paint and mind.” Indeed, in long, musical lines she vividly paints the “real world,” which is, she tells us, “a world of concept, still.” We find in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” for example, Heidegger, Van Gogh, and the poet’s dog Lily, a “little brown being in the dirt.” Slachman moves with remarkable skill from one to another—philosopher, artist, animal—in a richly textured poetry that invites us, also, to contemplate “how the world worlds.”
Allison Funk
Heidegger’s Temple
“Heidegger’s Temple offers layers of metaphor, exquisitely composed, that beckon us to ponder new ideas and complex states of feeling as sensuous discoveries, freshly illumined philosophic landscapes where order doesn’t depend on the centrality of the human. Slachman is not content with art as allusion merely; instead she imaginatively inhabits a given sensibility, making that way of seeing palpable. The artist most deeply alive in this collection is Rainer Maria Rilke; his tragic sense of death as life’s most basic process fits well with Slachman’s edgier voice and her vigilant resistance to unearned harmonies.”
Beth Ash
Inside Such Darkness: Poems
“Whether praising the world, or peering into the darkness that is always on the verge of engulfing it, Virginia Slachman won't give up her relentless search for meaning, beauty, wholeness. Anything might, at any moment, become a vehicle for this vision of the world as sacred and complete--sycamore branches, a man dragging a cross up Hollywood Blvd., a garbage truck unloading dumpsters....”
Kurt Brown