Shattered

Dick Francis

ISBN 10: 1435292065 ISBN 13: 9781435292062

Publisher: Paw Prints 2008-05-29, 2008

Synopsis

When jockey Martin Stukely dies after a fall at Cheltenham, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape. Logan is a glassblower on the verge of widespread acclaim. Long accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass and in maintaining a glassmaking furnace at never less than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, Logan is suddenly faced with terrifying threats to his business, his courage, and his life.

Believing that the missing video holds the key to a priceless treasure, and wrongly convinced that Logan knows where to find it, criminal forces set out to press him for information he doesn't have. To survive, he realizes that he himself must sort out the truth. The final race to the tape throws more hazards in Logan's way than his dead jockey friend could ever have imagined.

Glass shatters. Logan doesn't ...but it's a close-run thing.

"Dick Francis is a genius . . ."-Los Angeles Times

About this title

Review:

After 41 novels, most writers run out of energy before the final gallop. But Dick Francis's latest thriller is as good as his earliest. Perhaps it's because this one is dedicated to the Queen Mother, who celebrated her centennial in 2000, and who, like her famously horsey daughter, shares Francis's passion for the races. Or maybe he's just found his stride again, after a few less-than-outstanding starts. Here he does one of his best tricks: lures you into a somewhat arcane area you might know little about and explicates it so brilliantly that you don't even realize how much you've learned (in this case, about glass blowing) while a mystery is unraveled, a crime is solved, and the hero gets the girl.

This time the mise en scène is the glass blowing studio owned by Gerard Logan, friend of the late Martin Stukely, a jockey who takes a fatal fall at the Cheltenham steeplechase during the last race of the century. Still mourning Martin, Gerard is savagely beaten, his workshop ransacked, and his life threatened by a gang of thugs. Investigating, Gerard discovers that the gang includes a domineering woman who's the daughter of Martin's valet and a scientist who's stolen valuable data from the laboratory that formerly employed him. They believe Gerard has possession of a videotape entrusted to him by Martin before his death and that the secrets on the tape are worth Gerard's life.

It's a good set up, with just enough of the usual horse lore and a pleasant love story involving Gerard and a pretty policewoman, neither of which overshadow the taut pacing and the well-worked-out plot. Francis's protagonists may be accidental heroes, but they're not antiheroes; they're usually eminently decent, likable men, and their sense of self is always interesting. Here's Gerard at home, in a break from the action, thinking about the new woman in his heart in a typical Francis love scene:

I walked deliberately through all the rooms, thinking about Catherine, wondering both if she would like the place, and whether the house would accept her in return. Once in the past the house had delivered a definite thumbs-down, and once I'd been given an ultimatum to smother the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper as a condition of marriage, but to the horror of her family I'd backed out of the whole deal, and, as a result, I now used the house as arbiter and had disentangled myself from a later young woman who'd begun to refer to her and me as "an item" and to reply to questions as "we." We think. No, we don't think.

And, a few pages later,

The speed of development of strong feeling for one another didn't seem to me to be shocking but natural, and if I thought about the future it unequivocally included Catherine Dodd. "If you want to cover the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper, go ahead," I said.

She laughed. "I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change them?"

It may be Francis's English reticence that keeps him, mercifully, from spoiling a good mystery with what other writers consider the obligatory sex scene, or it just may be the mastery of his form that few of his peers approach. In every page of this terrific new book, he's at the top of it. --Jane Adams

About the Author:

Dick Francis is the author of many bestselling mysteries, most recently Second Wind . A three-time Edgar Award-winner, the Mystery Writers of America named him Grand Master in 1996.

About this edition

• Publisher: Paw Prints 2008-05-29
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1435292065
• ISBN 13: 9781435292062
• Binding: Library Binding