As always with Jilly's books, you get drawn in completely to her world, engaging with and caring about the characters (and awaiting the villains getting their comeuppance). I absolutely loved this book and it's increased my desire to go back to the days of Riders and Rivals and find out how it all began. But Etta is horrified when Valent cooks up a plot with Rupert to enter Mrs Wilkinson for the Grand National. Classic Cooper: either the perfect beach read or else something to curl up on the sofa with to keep out the encroaching autumn chill. I don’t think I could read two Rutshire books back to back, because I get so seriously emotionally involved.

Only to be surprised and let down by the sudden and out-of-tone scenes in the middle of the book, featuring drunken threesomes/foursomes, and then disgusted at the lightly-portrayed rape of an underage character, and the complete lack of depth and resolution to it throughout the entire rest of the book. Plenty of old favourites, like Rupert Campbell-Black, along with a whole new village of characters to fall in love with.

Jump is totally outrageous with over the top storylines and characters and should be read with tongue firmly placed in cheek.

Etta Bancroft - sweet, kind, still beautiful - adores racing and harbours a crush on one of its stars, the handsome, high-handed owner-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black. It makes me so cross in a time when so many talented authors are struggling to get published that this utter horse-manure should make it onto the shelf and that we, trusting Cooper's previous record, should pay good money for it. In this through-the-looking-glass version of England, toffs are either arrogant and gorgeous or chinless and sweet; virile working-class men who don't deny their roots are rough diamonds oozing sex appeal; but affectation of any kind is an instant clue that a character is Up To No Good. Aside from a few appearances from Rupert Campbell – Black and some of the children mentioned in Cooper’s previous book, Wicked, the cast in this book is all new, and not a very interesting group.The sexual explicitness here seems part of a wider desire to stay up to date that has, at best, mixed results. Only through sheer determination and constant complaining did I finish this diabolical excuse for a book!

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. Her clear thrill in racing can be seen in passages showing the excitement of race day - especially the biggest race of all, the Grand National. You get wrapped around the characters’ lives and are fully submerged for the duration of the book gasping for air amidst tears of sorrow and joy in the final pages. However, I find myself not minding this, since it is a commonly used story (I've read similar from other books by Jilly, to those written by Fiona Walker, right through to the Black Stallion novels by Walter Farley).The characters are poor faded shades of the vibrant witty loveable rogues she created in her earlier works (Riders and Polo being the best examples of these). It's one heck of a book standing at over 700 pages so to be able to keep me immersed fairly consistently until the last page is no mean feat. Some of the hundreds of characters are one-dimensional, I disliked many of them (particularly the women) and Rafiq's character is a terrible cliche (almost insultingly so). She started her career as a journalist and wrote numerous works of non-fiction before writing several romance novels, the first of which appeared in 1975.

But I really enjoyed the book felt it was more modern than her previous books and I even shed a tear at the end. After being so impressed with Jilly's take on relationships, I was not happy to have a couple of sex scenes that verged on rape, including one involving a foursome where a participant was being forced into joining in. In this novel her characters are more like stereotypes, the successful business man or the ruthless horse owner willing to do anything to win. The filly charms everyone in the village, and when tests reveal her to be a spectacularly well-bred racehorse a village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training.When her bullying husband dies, Etta’s selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset house to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood.