Actually, considering Sebastian's personality, I think it works even better. Let go the reins and tossed off his horse, perhaps, in front of superior officers, with a cracked tibia, or something?

Hmm. I don't want Sebastian to actually be an incompetent rider or anything, but I'm also not sure I want to give him a straightforward good rider fall like I gave James in the first chapter by having Ghost get spooked (pun intended) and refuse a fence. Maybe there's a new horse who's a bit of a brute, and Sebastian thinks he can be the one to tame him and gets thrown in the process?

Yes, exactly. Not incompetence: overreaching. That's where I was going with it.

And if he's afraid he's embarrassed himself in the eyes of his fellow officers, it'll make him all the more eager to court a superior officer's pretty, rich cousin. I like this.

How do you decide who to kill?(Because, ok, it's noir. Somebody's ticket's getting punched. ) But I can't decide if it should be Mysterious Rich Hottie Client's Sister or if someone should die in the quest to protect MRHCS and she's in more of a "Can they save her before it's too late?" kind of deal. Most of my fiction doesn't go in for killing...except with sharp words.

erika, it depends. How annoying is the sister, how vital is she to the continued happiness of the hottie brother?

Hmm. In my work I mostly kill people just to streamline the plot and get them out of the way (and, boy, is it easy to do in the late 18th and early 19th centuries--French bullets and consumption and childbed fever, oh my!). But I think you want to go for the most important person dying that you can make the rest of the story work without. IOW, kill the sister if you can, IMO.

I could, defintely...there are still many ways to take a person out in this century.

Yep. The beauty of the past for a death-minded writer is it's just so easy to kill people young without necessarily resorting to violence.

No shit. If I ended up choosing death for the sister, it'd be a blunt-force trauma, as she's survived a difficult birth and a car accident that killed her husband already, and, to quote a perp on Homicide who tried to hit the same woman twice "the bitch just won't die."