Damage

Starred review from August 25, 2014
Francis’s fourth solo outing (after 2013’s Dick Francis’s Refusal) ranks with the best of his late father’s thrillers set in the British horse racing world. At the Cheltenham Racetrack in Gloucestershire, Jeff Hinkley, an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority, spots ex-trainer Matthew Unwin, who’s been barred from the track for horse doping. Unwin approaches a bookie and, without warning, slashes the man’s throat. The murder is open-and-shut, though Unwin’s motive is unclear. Meanwhile, an extortionist, who calls himself Leonardo, reveals that he was responsible for drugging almost all the horses who raced in the Gold Cup, and demands £5 million in exchange for not destroying the integrity of the sport. Jeff takes on the job of stopping Leonardo, but he must also deal with a family illness and a narcotics charge against his sister’s stepson. The compelling main storyline deserves high marks for originality—no mean feat given the almost 50 novels the author’s father wrote. Agent: Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.

September 15, 2014
A professional horse-racing investigator has to ride three unruly mounts at once in the fourth and most ambitious of the younger Francis' suspensers. It's always something for Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley. Since the ace investigator and his British Horseracing Authority colleague Nigel Green are shadowing banned horse trainer Matthew Unwin at the Cheltenham racetrack, they're on hand when Unwin stabs bookmaker Jordan Furness to death right before their eyes, landing them both in a legal quagmire and Jeff perhaps in even deeper trouble. Then eminent barrister Quentin Calderfield, the husband of Jeff's cancer-stricken sister, Faye, wants Jeff to find and neutralize the witness who testified that Quentin's son Kenneth offered to sell him some of the crystal meth the coppers found in Ken's place during a wild party. But Jeff's third case is by far the biggest and nastiest. An extortionist calling himself Leonardo has doped dozens of horses running at the Cheltenham Festival and threatens to keep causing wholesale trouble for the rest of the season, undermining the BHA's authority and bringing the racing industry to its knees, unless the Authority pays him 5 million to go away. Ignoring Jeff, who urges them to call the police, the BHA directors charge him with identifying and exposing the extortionist. They provide no budget and no manpower to help him and fire him to boot to make whatever cover story he dreams up more convincing-and incidentally to provide themselves some deniability if anything should go wrong. Francis (Dick Francis's Refusal, 2013, etc.) expertly choreographs Jeff's extended cat-and-mouse duel with the resourceful Leonardo. Fans of both thrillers and horse racing will be on tenterhooks until Jeff unmasks his opponent, who turns out to have been a lot more memorable in disguise.

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September 15, 2014
Since the 2010 death of Dick Francis, who was both a champion steeplechase rider and a champion novelist, his son, Felix, has written four mysteries that continue Dick Francis' line of horse thrillers. This latest Felix entry has a very sure stride but lacks some of the visceral impact of Dick Francis' work, largely because, while the elder Francis was a very visual writer, Felix's characters and settings are given short descriptive shrift. Like his father, however, Felix is a master plotter and suspense builder. His hero this time is Jeff Hinkley, an undercover investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. The plot starts off in a very Hitchcockian mode, with a murder during the running of the Cheltenham Racing Festival. Hinkley, a witness to the murder, is drawn into an investigation that fans out to the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in racing and, finally, into an examination of fiendishly clever sabotage tactics against the British racing industry itself. A wonderful feature of this book is the wealth of detail Francis provides about racing, including, for example, information on why chocolate is an illegal substance for about-to-race horses. Another Francis thriller in which danger and suspense build with each scene.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)