Horses, money & murder: How Rancho Santa Fe’s rich inspired Eliza Jane Brazier’s novel

“There’s a reason they say ‘horse girls’ but not ‘soccer girls’ or ‘ballet girls.’ Horses consume you.”

Only a bonafide horse girl who knows bell boots from breeches could write a line like that with such authority. It’s clear from the first pages of the delightfully wicked murder mystery “Girls and Their Horses” – set amid the opulence of Rancho Santa Fe’s equestrian community and the tony, cutthroat world of showjumping – that author Eliza Jane Brazier has spent a lot of time in the saddle.

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More than a pulpy page-turner, Brazier infuses “Girls and Their Horses” with cutting insights about class, wealth and privilege – much as she did with her darkly satirical novel, “Good Rich People.” In the new book, she adds another layer of meaning to it all, about the toxicity of parents imposing their own dreams upon their children. The story of what happens when a nouveau riche mom pressures her daughter to take up riding in order to both gain entry into elite old-money circles and fulfill the mom’s own need for acceptance, “Girls and Their Horses” is getting a lot of buzz in places like Oprah Daily, Glamour, Town & Country and the Today show, which called it “the thriller of the summer.”

You could say Brazier, who grew up in the San Diego County’s La Costa, just outside of Rancho Santa Fe, has been researching this novel her whole life. A horse-crazy kid from the get-go, she started riding lessons when she was five years old.

“By the time I was, like, eight, I was a working student, basically. I’m from a family of nine children and [my parents] are not wealthy, so I had to work to be able to have access to horses,” says Brazier on a video call from her home in Norco, a huge carousel horse serving as her backdrop.

By age 18, she’d worked her way up to being the head rider in the training program at her local barn. Then it was time to go to college, followed by marriage and a move to England, where she set about writing young adult novels under the name Eliza Wass. And just like that, almost a decade of her life passed by without horses.

Then the unthinkable happened: Her husband died unexpectedly.

A couple of years passed in a fog of grief, and then she went to a family reunion held at a Northern California dude ranch.

“I got to ride again. And I was like, oh [expletive],” says Brazier with a laugh. “I mean, I feel like it happens to a lot of people who stop riding at a certain age. They come back to it and they go, ‘Why wasn’t I doing this the whole time, why did I stop?’ Because, I mean, my life wasn’t horrible or anything, but it was missing something that whole time. I feel like I had been trying to fill it with other things that were not necessarily healthy or happy things, you know? So that trip was just kind of an eye-opener.”

The experience of riding at the dude ranch motivated her to move back to the U.S. and center her life around horses again. She actually ended up landing the head wrangler gig at that very same dude ranch.

Happy ending? Not exactly.

“It was kind of a disaster,” she says. “The horse part was great, don’t get me wrong.”

Within six weeks she was looking for a new place to land – taking with her the inspiration for her first adult-themed thriller, “If I Disappear,” published in 2021. She secured a position as a trainer at Hayden Clarke Show Jumping in Orange County’s Laguna Hills.

“I started with doing the job that no one wants, the summer camps,” she says with a laugh.

As much as she loved the kids and the horses, working six days a week while commuting to the OC from her parent’s home in San Diego took its toll.

“I was coming to the realization that, ‘You’re never gonna be able to afford to live out here on this salary. So this really isn’t gonna work.’”

That’s when she decided to pull up stakes again and move to Los Angeles with the hope of writing for television. “Which was very optimistic of me!” she laughs again.

Optimistic but not wrong – Brazier’s books are all currently in development. But before Hollywood came knocking, she needed a day job, so once again she turned to horses, this time at the Paddock Riding Club in Atwater Village.

“I taught all the sorts of kids of the rich and famous. And it was from those experiences that I got the idea for this [novel], because you’d see all the different parent-children dynamics. You have these gorgeous women who like come from nothing and always dreamed of having a horse. The kid, you know, could not be less interested. And it was just intriguing, you know, because I don’t think it’s a negative impulse to say, ‘This is my dream of a beautiful life and I’m going to give it to you.’

“But even though I don’t think it’s a negative to want to give your kids the life you never had, it’s also dangerous.”

Those dangers are what Brazier digs into to create the suspenseful read that is “Girls and Their Horses” –  a world of betrayal, jealousies and cruelty, with one exception: Horses. The beautiful and generous creatures form the book’s moral center, its one purely good thing. Or, as one of the characters notes, “Anyone who didn’t believe in magic had never ridden a horse.”

And rather than riding other people’s horses as a trainer, Brazier now has her own magic – she promised herself that if the book was picked up by a publisher, she’d buy her first horse. And she did, a pinto mare named Tennessee, after playwright Tennessee Williams.

“So after quitting the [horse show] industry,” she says with a grin, “I could finally afford a horse.”