Sarah Taylor trains horses at her Aunt Tilda's farm.  Dante Devers photographs horses for a horseman’s magazine.  This common denominator between the two draws them into a less-than-amiable first meeting.  Yet it is the underlying factors of Sarah Taylor's former employment as grief counselor at Boston General hospital and her association with former patient Susan St. Pierre, a young woman who died under mysterious circumstances, that serves as the true impetus of their 'relationship'. 

Dante suspects Sarah as being complicit in his sister's death.  Sarah quietly searches for answers to her own suspicions of her friend Susan's proclaimed suicide, in addition to being haunted by the tragic death of her fiancé Jay Fontaine, a fellow worker at Boston General.  Somehow these mutual affinities draw them into a love/hate relationship both humorous in its 'get-away-from me/come-closer aura, and intimate in the protecting embrace brought on by the threat to Sarah's life.

The nebulous entity of Boston General's genetics laboratory, "The Doctor -- as he prefers to be known -- a supervisor to Sarah's former fiancé, Jay Fontaine, is orchestrating something.  He is tracking Sarah's movements and searching her possessions.  The question is for what reason?  What threat does she pose any longer to him?

It would not be enough just to say THE STABLE AFFAIR was a good read.  This was a remarkable piece of work.  Jessica Andersen is a tremendous writer.  She accomplished things for which every author should strive, creating not simply dynamic characters in Sarah Taylor and Dante Devers; but she likewise wrote a tale which easily could have wallowed in predictability and made it as genuine as any real-life, true-to-the-calling experiences.  

I offer a clear example in the use of the equestrian lifestyle.  It has nothing at all to do with the book's main plot -- the secretive genetics-testing going on at the BoGen laboratory.  Nevertheless, she makes it interesting to not lose the reader with a divergence into extraneous material.  Sarah Taylor is thoroughly familiar with horses.  She has presumably been around them all her life.  Though I personally know nothing of such interests outside of the occasional surfing through the television channels and landing on a horse-jumping competition for a handful of seconds, that reality is so effectively transmuted by author Jessica Andersen -- with an expertise she clearly holds herself -- I found myself as intrigued by the horse competitions as I did the mystery of the book's main plot – or, that is, the perceived main plot.

Whether or not the genetics testing at the BoGen laboratory and the deaths of Susan St. Pierre and Jay Fontaine are THE STABLE AFFAIR’s main plot only Jessica Andersen herself could say for certain.  From my perspective, this center stage plot is a mere vehicle used to transport the burgeoning romance between Sarah and Dante.  Absent it, the book would have fallen into the ranks as another cheap dime-store novella about handsome, muscle-bound men with pirate blood in their veins wresting from a vacuous existence of hopeless dreaming the statuesque Amazonian goddess awaiting her chance to soar through the clouds and into the life divine.

Well… not exactly.  Andersen’s writing still exceeds those less-aspiring attempts at literature.  Her weaving of the two plots together, showcasing expertise in both equestrian matters and genetics, holding predictability at bay (there are subtle surprises with nearly every change of locale), and detailing the tenuous feelings of attraction – for both the male and female – in relationships and attraction is absolutely compelling.  The humor of how silly we all act in trying to relate to someone we are attracted to, she captures it.  Some of the exchanges between Sarah and Dante are funnier than anything I have read in a long time – including a scenario with dreams that was so original; I would buy the book just to read that one section all over again.