Showing results by author "Dick Francis" in All Categories

James Tyrone was the troubleshooting gracing correspondent of the Sunday Blaze, a newspaper dedicated to exposing scandals I the noisiest (and most profitable) way. Ty was accustomed to hot water, but from the day a Fleet Street colleague died after give him some serious advice, he found himself wading deep into more danger than he expected.

The night before the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket sees the great and the good of the horse-racing community gathered for a black-tie gala dinner, cooked by Max Moreton. However, Max's food is soon suspected of putting 24 guests in hospital with food poisoning.

When the horse that wins a race gallops in with frothing mouth and popping eyes, what is more natural than to suspect that someone¿s slipped a booster into his oats? With eleven steeplechasers hurtling over the finish line in this pepped up states and all the dope tests conclusively negative, the Earl of October had something of a problem if he wanted to preserve the health of his favorite sport.

When Kit Fielding, champion steeplechase jockey, finds out that his chief patron, Princess Casilia, is facing an increasingly serious threat, he goes unhesitatingly to her aid. Neither realises that his instinctive support is the first step towards a frightening battle involving violent risk, with the honour of the princess's family as the prize and Kit's own destruction as the forfeit.

Free choice? There's no such thing, according to Lee Morris. Choice is pre-ordained by your personality. Stratton Park racecourse faces ruin in the hands of a squabbling family. Lee is slowly sucked into the turmoil, unwillingly on the surface but half-understanding the deep compulsions that influence his decisions. One road leads to safety, another to death. How do you know which is which?

Philip Nore is nearing the end as a jockey. George Millace is finished in photography. The differnce is, Millace is dead, and Nore has discovered his secret: a set of files which would blow the top off the racing world. Hated by a dying grandmother he has never known and abused by a trainer he knows only too well, Nore is no stranger to shabby morals. And when he begins to decipher the dead man's photographs, he uncovers corruption on a scale he had never imagined.

Perry Stuart is a TV meteorologist who routinely works before the cameras. His life calm and ordered, his face familiar to every British household, Stuart's profound weather knowledge and accuracy have given him high status among forecasters, but no physical baptism by storm. Not, that is, until a fellow forecaster offers him a Caribbean hurricane-chasing ride in a small aeroplane.

Family ties mean trouble, but when jockey Kit Fielding comes to the aid of his twin sister and her husband, Bobby Allardeck, even death threatens. Putting behind him an age old feud, Kit tries to find out who is behind a vicious newspaper campaign which is jeopardising Bobby's career as a racehorse trainer. Combining his investigations with riding winners he makes some startling discoveries.

It's the third death on Cheltenham Gold Cup Day that really troubles Sid Halley. He knows the perils of racing all too well, but in his day, jockeys didn't reach the finishing line with three .38 rounds in the chest.

Matt Shore was an experienced pilot. He’d done it all. From big jets to flying in supplies to war zones. So when he gets a job ferrying high class punters around England’s race courses he might be forgiven for expecting a quiet life. But then his plane explodes in a massive fireball. He could have been in it. Some quiet life. Instead he’s landed in the middle of a nightmare world where there is big money at stake. Very big money.

From international bestselling author Dick Francis and his son Felix comes a gripping new racing thriller. Captain Thomas Forsyth’s tour of Afghanistan is cut brutally short when he’s badly wounded by a roadside bomb. Tom’s world is torn apart by the injury - the Army is his life. Six months of recuperation leave is a daunting prospect - but not as bleak as the probability of never rejoining his regiment. Tom returns to Lambourn, to his childhood home, where his mother is a racehorse trainer and the ‘First Lady’ of racing.

Despair, suicide, and obsessive hatred, mixed well with humor, love, and horses, brew up into the story of a battle between one man's nerve and another man's cunning. Robert Finn, steeplechase jockey, finds himself the focus of a malicious campaign which is also afflicting his friends. He sets out to discover its source, and remove it.

When defence barrister Geoffrey Mason hears the judge’s verdict, he quietly hopes that a long and arduous custodial sentence will be handed down to his arrogant young client. That Julian Trent only receives eight years seems all too lenient. Little does Mason expect that he’ll be looking Trent in the eyes again much sooner than he’d ever imagined.

At an annual party to celebrate the success of the racing season, everything seemed to be running well to form, including the need for more champagne. Then a runaway horsebox ploughed into the marquee. A witness to the terrible death and destruction, wine merchant Tony Beach knows it is just one of those tragic accidents. But when his expert advice is called into play over sub-standard alcohol in a local night club, connections start to click, and another person dies, horribly.

The unexpected arrival of a new apprentice jockey at his father's racing stables heralds the beginning of a series of dark happenings for Neil Griffon. First his father suffers a grisly accident, then Neil is brutally assaulted and abducted. The price for his freedom will mean the betrayal and deception of those who trust Griffon most. But he has no choice: a no-compromise crime czar has made an ultimatum - that his own 18-year-old son be hired by Griffon's stables to ride the superstar horse, Archangel, in the Derby.

A British jockey, riding in Norway, has disappeared, and with him has gone a day's takings from the turnstiles of Oslo racecourse. The Norwegian police have found no trace of him, nor have the British, and the case is being filed as just one more unsolved theft. David Cleveland, investigator for the Jockey Club, is a last resort. He goes without much expectation, and finds himself in waters as dark and deep as the fjords.

Henry Grey doesn't particularly care for having been born the heir to an earldom. He is a reserved young man whose greatest problem is his mother's matchmaking plots and whose greatest joy is to ride as an amateur steeplechase jockey. But on a sudden impulse, he throws in his respectable desk job to join a firm that transports racehorses all over the world. Yardman Transport proves to be Henry's passport to many things, not the least the girl he loves, and a tidy little racket that brings him face to face with death.

Gene Hawkins, investigator by trade, was expert at arranging events so that they appeared accidental to all involved. Therefore, when he himself witnessed an ‘accident’ his curiosity flared up bright, and he insisted on looking into what he regarded as a work of art. A quarter of a million pounds worth of Derby-winning stallion had vanished into the Blue Grass of Kentucky... and a young man and a girl spent a dangerous afternoon in a punt on the River Thames.

When he wakes in a pitch-black room with his hands bound, Roland Britten – accountant and champion steeplechase jockey – knows he’s entered a nightmare of someone else’s making. Wracking his brain to figure out who’s out to get him and why, he comes up empty, but somehow manages a death-defying escape. It isn’t long, though, before he’s recaptured.

Tim Ekaterin's merchant bank, like all banks, only invests in sure things. Now he's about to involve it in ₤5 million of prime horseflesh, a stallion called Sandcastle. Top breeders reckon it's the safest bet in racing. But racing doesn't just attract the money men of the city. It's riddled with all kinds of dubious dealmakers. People who don't think twice about breaking bones. People to whom no bet is safe until it's paid in blood, Ekaterin's blood.