Fact mixes with fantasy as a hairless blue horse discovered in South Africa in 1860, grazing with a herd of zebra, becomes the object of a quest by a trio of unlikely time travelers. Rosina, an intrepid Victorian young lady, her fiance, Ned York, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London by his uncle, Richard III, and the irascible Olga from Czarist Russia must work together to obtain the horse from its owner, an amiable but none-too-bright English peer who has scandalized his neighbors by marrying a circus bareback rider. Along the way are visits to two bizarre fin de siecle Paris nightclubs and an encounter with a talking brass head who tells the worst ghost stories you have ever heard. There's also a demanding, narcissistic twenty-fourth-century celebrity who wants to make a troupe of convincing-looking fairies appear to Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Rosina encounters an unexpected person on her trip to the past to obtain the blue horse: Her father. He's only nineteen and has no idea who she is. Should she warn him of the railway accident that will kill him twenty-six years in the future and lead to her becoming a time traveler? Complicating things further is a shady character claiming to be an American millionaire who wants the blue horse for reasons of his own.
About the Author: Jill Hand grew up in a little town on the New Jersey Shore where time moved at a more leisurely pace than it did elsewhere. She distinctly remembers a man who came around in the summers selling vegetables from a wagon drawn by a horse that wore a straw hat, and an Italian knife-grinder who went from door to door, singing opera and peddling a bicycle that pulled a little cart with a grindstone on the back. She drinks a lot of coffee, black, no sugar. Jill is keenly interested in history, especially the little things that don't usually make it into the historical accounts. As a case in point, she once read the diary of one of her ancestors who operated an artillery piece during some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. He was at the Battle of Gettysburg, but he didn't have much to say about it. Instead, he went on and on about some apple pie that a farmer gave him during a lull in the fighting. Those are the details that Jill likes to put into her stories; not how the battle turned out, but how good a piece of apple pie tasted to a gangly nineteen-year-old from rural New Jersey, who went off to war because his brothers and cousins were going and it seemed like the thing to do. Jill is a graduate of the College of New Jersey, with a degree in elementary education and minors in Spanish and psychology. Her psychology studies convinced her that everybody is a little bit crazy in one way or another. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Jill now writes speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Another Realm, Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Jersey Devil Press, Suspense, and Weird NJ. The Blue Horse is Jill's first novella. It's about employees of a twenty-fourth-century business that specializes in time travel and their quest for a remarkable animal that actually existed. She wholeheartedly believes that time travel will be possible someday and that, like television and the Internet, it will eventually be used primarily for entertainment purposes.