The book studies the many mysteries of Phar Lap's career, including the infamous shooting that occurred just days before his great triumph in the 1930 Melbourne Cup. The book examines the way an emerging media played its part in building the legend. The authors provide an analysis of his previously unexplained death in North America and explain why Phar Lap is much more than a racehorse.

Innumerable books, articles and a full length motion picture have been written and produced about the almost unbelievable career of the magnificent race horse Phar Lap and his mysterious death. Many experts have proclaimed him to be the greatest ever. This book corrects much of the misinformation surrounding his death and opens the door to further theorizing on how and why be died.

Tommy Woodcock spent a long lifetime with horses, but is best remembered, and loved, as the young man who strapped and looked after Australia's legendary racehorse, Phar Lap. The 1930 Melbourne Cup winner and the people's champion of the Great Depression died mysteriously - cradled by Woodcock - in the US after winning against the odds in Agua Caliente, Mexico, at his only start overseas. The horseman called Phar Lap "Bobby", and knew him best. And Woodcock is fondly known, too, as the old man, who almost 50 years on, trained the gallant Reckless, second in the 1977 Melbourne Cup and winner of the other major "two-mile" races on the Australian turf calendar at the time, the Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane Cups. Reckless is the same horse Woodcock let children ride at the track on race day, and was pictured with bunked down in the straw, on the front page of The Age newspaper. Woodcock's life story and his great and heart-breaking moments with Phar Lap and Reckless are told in his own down-to- earth words by a master storyteller, Jan Wositzky, in this updated and revised edition, with a new introduction.

Melbourne during the depression. A seedy, corrupt city. Someone has struck at the heart of Australia's soul: they have killed the horse that would have won the Melbourne Cup. For what motive? Profit, blackmail, a betting scam? Only Tom Pink, the rider of the murdered horse can find out. Tom, born into the underworld he now tries to defeat, exposes graft and blackmail that reaches to the upper echelons of Melbourne society. His life and the lives of those he holds close will never be the same again. The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery, written in 1933, a year after the mysterious death of Phar Lap (winner of the 1930 Melbourne Cup) is a previously lost classic of Australian crime fiction.

Homeless, hunted, and desperate to escape a bitter storm, Keira takes refuge in an abandoned groundskeeper's cottage. Her new home is tucked away at the edge of a cemetery, surrounded on all sides by gravestones: some recent, some hundreds of years old, all suffering from neglect. And in the darkness, she can hear the unquiet dead whispering. The cemetery is alive with faint, spectral shapes, led by a woman who died before her time…and Keira, the only person who can see her, has become her new target. Determined to help put the ghost to rest, Keira digs into the spirit's past life with the help of unlikely new friends, and discovers a history of deception, ill-fated love, and murder. But the past is not as simple as it seems, and Keira's time is running out. Tangled in a dangerous web, she has to find a way to free the spirit...even if it means offering her own life in return.

While more has been written in Australia about "Big Red" than perhaps any other horse, this book is different in that it reveals a wealth of previously unknown information about Phar Lap's New Zealand background. Phar Lap: The Untold Story, covers his breeding and naming; the truth about Harry Telford's obsessive drive to buy him; an in-depth history of Harry Telford as a jockey and trainer in Australia and New Zealand, and the true story about his sad personal life; and precise details of how Phar Lap came to be purchased. Also revealed is the story of Phar Lap's passage from Australia to America via New Zealand for his ultimate success in winning the Agua Caliente Handicap and his subsequent, still mysterious death, sixteen days after that crowning achievement. Other sections deal with his most sensational victories and the reasons for the few failures in his career, the biggest of which was the 1931 Melbourne Cup, which Putt and McCord claim was an "impossible mission".

The incredible story, for the first time told in novel form, of Phar Lap, the racehorse that became a champion, and then a legend. Phar Lap first ... daylight second. It became a familiar refrain from racecallers as the great horse tore up every race track and record, becoming the people's champion in 1930s Australia and abroad. For those closest to the mighty stallion it would be the ride of their lives, on and off the track, as careers, relationships and fortunes were made and lost in just a few years of unrivalled glory. Award winning author Kelly Ana Morey takes the reader beyond the racetrack histories and the popular mythologies and, for the first time in novel form, brings to life the characters and the times that turned Phar Lap into the legend he remains to this day. Equal parts tragedy, triumph, thriller and mystery, Daylight Second has a heart as big as Phar Lap himself.