Christina Lynch’s Pony Confidential is a light, highly readable mystery co-narrated by murder suspect Penny and her childhood pet, Pony, who comes to her rescue despite his lingering resentment that Penny sold him when he was young.
When Penny is arrested and extradited for a murder she allegedly committed in New York State when she was twelve years old, Pony is still seething from having been sold by his beloved caretaker, who promised they’d be together forever.
“All ponies get passed around like a stomach virus instead of getting to live out our years as adored pets like those lesser animals that are basically useless sacks of fur,” notes Pony with his characteristic (and endearing) snark. In the twenty-five years since being sold by Penny’s family, Pony has been bought and sold again and again, and is now pushing thirty, an old age for ponies, who can live up to forty years. “I do not love my job,” he reflects, while being humiliatingly dressed up as a unicorn for a children’s party.
Penny, a schoolteacher who has a daughter suffering from mental illness and is separated from her husband, is stunned to find herself on a plane, handcuffed, heading to New York. “I’m a law-abiding wife and mother! she wants to shout at the other passengers. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket! I drive a Prius!”
In alternating chapters, Penny’s and Pony’s stories unfold—Penny’s from the time of her arrest onward, Pony’s from the time he and Penny were separated. Penny, charged with second-degree murder, is assigned a public defender whom she rarely sees; she works mainly with the inexperienced and overwhelmed intern assigned to her case. Pony, after years of indignities, now languishes in a tiny pen with a dog, Caya, and a goat, Circe. “People drive past this place all day long and they don’t care. No one slows or stops or questions why animals live in a tiny pen next to the highway and never leave it … Caya chews on her own feet. I find myself weaving back and forth just to have something to do.”
As Penny’s case looks more grim than ever, Pony realizes, through conversations with her fellow animal prisoners, that perhaps Penny isn’t solely to blame for what happened twenty-five years earlier. He is convinced by Caya and Circe to accept his own role in what happened all those years ago and to find Penny, reconnect, and make amends.
Pony escapes and sets off to return to where he last saw Penny—which also happens to be the scene of the crime, where Frank Ross, the owner of High Rise Farm, was murdered. Frank “was rich, and a grade A jerk. Lots of people must have hated him enough to kill him.” But who actually did?
As the narratives intertwine, the past is revealed through Penny’s days in jail (“Like a dutiful horse, she is fed, exercised, has her teeth examined by the jail’s dentist, cold fingers in her mouth.”) and Pony’s adventures in trying to get back to Ithaca, helped by a menagerie of animals, from birds to rats to fellow equines.
The talking animals are delightful, and so seamlessly woven into Pony’s story that it’s easy to suspend disbelief. The animals are vivid, smart, witty characters who liven up the narrative and give nonhumans the credit they deserve as individual, autonomous beings.
In addition, Pony’s point of view provides myriad examples of the ways humans use animals and how even well-meaning humans often fail them. He is cheeky and irreverent; after being sold by Penny’s family, he became jaded and distrustful of humans, for good reasons, but this worldview led to him being sold again and again—for throwing riders, for biting people. “I’ve never really tried to win at horse shows, because it was more fun to crush the dreams of the humans.” His stories expose the horrors of pony rides and the ugly side of professional show jumping.
Yet Pony isn’t a miserable character; he’s a lot of fun, and quite relatable: “everything I know about the world … can really be divided into two categories: food and food-adjacent.” He is also sympathetic, as his attempts to return to Penny involve him being bought, sold, stolen, and at one point rescued by animal activists and released at a pony sanctuary. “I’m free! Free like my pony ancestors!”
Yet it’s only a matter of time before he’s caught and imprisoned in a petting zoo. “There are eight of us ponies sharing an occasional flake of hay, and we have nothing but a rickety piece of tin under which we have to huddle together for warmth and protection from that razor-sharp wind.”
Meanwhile Penny is facing prison, along with women who are serving and facing life sentences for killing their abusers, and her experiences highlight the nearly insurmountable challenges for the non-privileged in navigating the justice system. Wanting to find Frank’s real killer and prove her innocence, Penny refuses the plea deal encouraged by her lawyers. She reflects that the lives of prisoners and owned horses are very much alike: “Keeping inmates in individual boxes is much easier on [the staff]. It’s why most people don’t keep horses in herds, even though that’s the natural way for them to live … In stalls, they are clean, separate, still, eating prescribed amounts of food. And most of the time, miserable and bored as hell.”
Penny and Pony’s stories eventually come together to reveal the secrets of the past as well as Frank’s murderer. Though Pony Confidential is very much about love and loss, the human-animal bond, and the many ways we humans can do better for animals, it’s also a compelling mystery with a surprising and satisfying conclusion.
Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novels Floreana and My Last Continent, the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English, and, with John Yunker, the suspense novel Devils Island.
