The hero's thoughts reveal a vulnerability that is touching, while his actions are always based on doing the right thing to achieve justice.Ĭausing the reader to deeply care about the characters in a novel is a difficult thing to do. The dialogue is clear and touched with humor no matter the intensity of evil that the hero faces.

The choices made are rational choices directed by a firm objective philosophy that belies all of Francis's novels. The heroes aren't always horse jockies, they can be film producers, or involve heroes engaged in peripheral professions that somehow always touch the horse racing world.īut more than that, Francis's heroes are rational human beings. What is there to say about Dick Francis? As I think about all of his books (yes, this review covers all of his books, and yes I've read them all) I think about a moral ethical hero, steeped in intelligence and goodness embroiled in evil machinations within British horse racing society - either directly or indirectly. In this case there's not much romance, although at one point our intrepid hero causes a woman to have an orgasm just by dancing with her! With that kind of talent, it's hard to imagine that even the most diabolical criminals will escape his reach for long. There's lots of intrigue, danger and action. This is a fairly typical novel from Dick Francis. But Cleveland is a typical Dick Francis protagonist, and he's not about to back down, irrespective of the possible consequences.

Cleveland pairs up with a Norwegian investigator named Arne Kristiansen, who tells David that he hopes the Englishman can pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.Īlmost as soon as Cleveland arrives in Norway, however, it becomes very clear that someone doesn't want him poking around, and the deeper he digs, the more dangerous things become. Accordingly, the racetrack officials call in David Cleveland, an investigator from the Jockey Club in England. Norwegian investigators have drawn a blank neither Sherman nor the money have surfaced and there's no record of him leaving the country. Sherman was last seen near the room where the money was inexplicably left unguarded, and the assumption is that he has run off with it.

At the same time Sherman went missing, so did sixteen thousand kroner-the day's take at the racecourse where Sherman had been riding that afternoon. When a British jockey named Richard Sherman disappears from a racecourse in Norway, he leaves behind a pregnant wife and a huge mystery.

Slay Ride by Dick Francis