Ashleigh Griffen is expecting her first child after the New Year, but on Christmas Eve, as she visits the stables to give treats to her favorite horses, a stallion's kick puts her life and her baby in jeopardy

In the attic of her parents' home, champion rider Ashleigh Griffen discovers an old diary she had kept as a girl at Edgardale, her family's first breeding farm. Ashleigh is transported back in memory to the year she turned eleven - reliving her love for Stardust, a beautiful chestnut mare, and for Black Night, the spirited colt whose birth she witnessed. Ashleigh remembers her terrible sadness when Black Night was stolen by horse thieves, and how hard she worked to find him. Painfully she recalls the devastation she felt during her struggle to save the horses she loved from a deadly virus that swept through the Edgardale stables. And Ashleigh relives all the happiness and tragedy of knowing Stardust - her very first horse, who was taken from her much too soon...

Accepted into the exclusive Chesterton Riding Academy, a thrilled Ashleigh Griffen pursues her lifelong dream of owning a horse and is confronted by jealous fellow students who attempt to sabotage her efforts during an important competition

Haunted by the past... Samantha McLean has a terrible scare when she sees Cindy, her adoptive sister, fall over Whitebrook's track rail during a workout. Cindy's accident is frighteningly similar to the one that caused Samantha's mother's death years earlier. Cindy's accident brings forth a flood of troubling memories for Samantha. She begins reliving the traumatic years which followed her mother's death—a difficult time when she and her father, Ian McLean, travelled aimlessly across the country in search of a place where they could rebuild their lives. Will Samantha rediscover happiness at Whitebrook farm? Or will she be tormented forever by the tragedies of her past? Read all the books in the Thoroughbred series and experience the thrill of riding and racing, along with Ashleigh Griffen, Samantha McLean, Cindy McLean and their beloved horses.