Synopses & Reviews
When race caller and television presenter Mark Shillingford calls a race in which his twin sister, Clare, an accomplished jockey, comes in second when she could have won, he believes the worst: that she deliberately lost, and the race was fixed.
When Mark confronts Clare with his suspicions, she storms offand its the last time Mark sees her alive. Hours later, Clare jumps to her death from the balcony of a London hotel. Devastated and guilt-ridden over her death, Mark goes in search of answers. Why would Clare throw a race? What led her to take her own life?
Or was it not suicide at all?
Review
“[Felix Francis] has one priceless advantage. He couldnt have had a better teacher.”—
The Washington Times
Praise for Dick Franciss Gamble
“[Felix] Francis…proves himself more than capable of carrying on the family legacy alone...Francis shares his father's gift for brisk storytelling—and for creating a sympathetic, wounded, but determined hero.”—Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Fresh from a posting in Tokyo, young British First Secretary Peter Darwin decides to holiday in England before taking up his next assignment for the Foreign Office. During a brief stopover in Miami, Peter is accidentally caught in a scuffle that leaves two acquaintances beaten and robbed. Peter stands by his new friends until they are safely delivered to thier next destination: Gloucestershire, England, his childhood home and scene of longburied memories. There walks unexpectedly into a veterinary surgeon's racehorse-related nightmare. As his involvement with the doctor's plight grows, and as more racehorses meet an utimely end, the doctor's plight grows, Peter realizes that events from his own past are the keys to saving some decent people -- and the things they love -- from destruction.
Synopsis
New York Times bestselling Grand Master of Crime Fiction Foreign Office diplomat Peter Darwin uncovers a peculiar operation involving a veterinary surgeon and the unexplained deaths of several valuable racehorses.
Synopsis
Foreign Office diplomat Peter Darwin uncovers a peculiar operation involving a veterinary surgeon and the unexplained deaths of several valuable racehorses.
About the Author
Dick Francis (pictured with his son Felix Francis) was born in South Wales in 1920. He was a young rider of distinction winning awards and trophies at horse shows throughout the United Kingdom. At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot, flying fighter and bomber aircraft including the Spitfire and Lancaster.
He became one of the most successful postwar steeplechase jockeys, winning more than 350 races and riding for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. After his retirement from the saddle in 1957, he published an autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write more than forty acclaimed books, including the New York Times bestsellers Even Money and Silks.
A three-time Edgar Award winner, he also received the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger, was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2000. He died in February 2010, at age eighty-nine, and remains among the greatest thriller writers of all time.