FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

BOOK REVIEW DESK - CRIME
By MARILYN STASIO
Published: October 8, 2006, Sunday

There’s lunatic fun to be had in the offbeat adventures Maggie Estep dreams up for her endearing slacker heroine, Ruby Murphy — if you happen to enjoy the kinds of places where this free spirit hangs out. In her home base of Coney Island, she lives in the shadow of the Cyclone and has a “downwardly mobile job” at a museum sideshow. But Ruby’s often to be found, as she is in FLAMETHROWER (Three Rivers, paper, $14), at her shrink’s, where her discovery of a human leg in a fish tank leads to a quest that takes her, as all her bizarre quests do, to the racetracks and stables where she truly comes alive. Aside from the usual gratuitous violence done to her person, Ruby lucks out this time, hitting the trifecta on one race and winning back her boyfriend on another.

Maggie Estep is a writer of a thousand voices -- well, a half-dozen anyway, since that's the number of characters who share the narrative chores in GARGANTUAN (Three Rivers, paper, $12.95) and offer multiple perspectives on the strange, sad tale of Attila Johnson, an apprentice jockey with a shady past but a sweet touch with racehorses. Every trainer, exercise rider and stablehand from Coney Island to the Belmont backside has a theory about the secretive Attila -- everyone except Ruby Murphy, a racetrack habitué who takes him as he is, even when strangers keep trying to kill him. Although Estep can get into just about anyone's head, including the horses who are such strong, individualized characters in this series, it's Ruby's singular voice and oddly detached sensibility that lend an air of danger to the storytelling.

BOOK REVIEW DESK - CRIME
By MARILYN STASIO
Published: March 23, 2003, Sunday

The performance artist Maggie Estep's debut mystery, HEX (Three Rivers, paper, $14), is so blazingly idiosyncratic that it's a real shock when a character actually plays by the genre rules and gets murdered. Ruby Murphy, the reluctant sleuth of this offbeat whodunit, is even more surprised than the reader when an apprentice jockey (''little tiny mean blond girl'') turns up dead at Belmont Park, where Ruby is working undercover as a hot-walker, a lowly stablehand who leads sweaty horses back to the stalls after their exercises. A free-spirited drifter who loves living rootless in Coney Island, Ruby allows a strange woman she meets on the subway to talk her into spying on the woman's boyfriend, a stable groom with sexy eyes and a dark history. (''He's a curse'' is how a fellow hot-walker describes him. ''A black wish.'')

Ruby hasn't a clue how to conduct an investigation. But she's such an enthusiast for life's little oddities that the whole world looks new in her eyes, and everything that comes out of her mouth sounds fresh. To her urban poet's sensibility, there's a deathly beauty to Coney Island, whose shuttered rides ''look like dark metal birds, their wings taped to their sides.'' Although she shares the narrative with several of her bizarre friends and neighbors, Ruby is such a ravishing original that it's love at first sight.

BOOK REVIEW DESK - NOTABLE BOOKS
2003 Published: December 7, 2003, Sunday

HEX. By Maggie Estep. (Three Rivers, paper, $14.) Ruby Murphy, the Coney Island drifter whose free spirit accounts for the ravishing originality of this idiosyncratic first mystery, falls for a perfect stranger's sob story and goes undercover as a stablehand at Belmont Park to keep tabs on a stable groom with sexy eyes and a mysterious past.

FROM THE NEW YORK POST

COLT FICTION: MAGGIE ESTEP LIKES WRITING MYSTERIES STARRING FILLIES
By PETE PAVIA
Published: October 8, 2006

Maggie Estep's acclaim as an author has come to her in a roundabout way. Armed with wit and edginess, Ms. Estep enjoyed a stint as a stand-up poet when poetry slams were all the rage. She parlayed that into frequent MTV appearances, then became a rock performer, even touring with Lollapalooza.

The inevitable publishing deal followed, leading to six books - including her first Ruby Murphy mystery, the critically hosanna'd "Hex" in 2003. Back with her slightly hapless amateur sleuth for a third installment, "Flamethrower," Estep also co-edits "Bloodlines," a collection of writing on horseracing.

Take us through your education as a horsewoman.

My father was a rider-for-hire in the show-jumping world; my mom trained [thoroughbreds] in Colorado.

One day hanging out with my mom, I watched a race. There was a huge longshot and he looked on his toes, so I bet on him and he won. I made something like 120 bucks off two. That made the wagering thing interesting to me.

How do you reconcile your affection for horses with your icy gambler's heart?

If I want to have a winning day, I stay away from the paddock, where I'll be swayed by affection for the individual horses. That's how I do best. But my spectacular long shot hits have come from gazing at a horse in the paddock and feeling utterly compelled to bet that horse.

Where did your sleuth, Ruby Murphy, spring from?

Ruby Murphy was a fluke. I was working on a novel about 18th-century gangster chicks - great idea, hard novel to write. I got so frustrated I started trying to write a little crime novel as an exercise to relieve pressure. It just kept going. Ruby came out, fully formed and kicking and screaming.

How natural was it for you to set her against the backdrop of thoroughbred racing?

Totally unavoidable. I'd been spending a little time on the Belmont backside, just lurking and observing. Didn't even know why. Then, when the Ruby character was born, she just seemed the kind of girl who'd end up somewhere like that.

Ruby seems to inhabit some long-gone New York, where a marginal life was not only plausible and desirable, but viable.

Ah, yes. That New York we loved. It barely has a pulse now, but what does remain is definitely in the outer reaches of the outer boroughs. That's why I love places like Coney Island or East New York or weird parts of Queens.

Have you considered writing a non-Ruby mystery, or fiction outside the genre?

I'm working on a rather insane literary novel called "Girls and Horses," about three women and one cranky black horse.

I'm also writing a bleak little crime novel called "The Rabbit," based on a horrible incident I witnessed in real life of a man beating his dog in Prospect Park. The dog lived and the scumbag got a felony charge, but I still couldn't shake the image of that poor felled beast. So I had to write a novel over it.