Showing results by author "Dick Francis" in All Categories

Jockey Kelly Hughes and trainer Dexter Cranfield have been barred from racing - a devastating event for them both. The charge at the secret enquiry? Throwing a race for personal profit. It is a vicious frame-up and, worse, they have nowhere to turn to clear their names. Still Hughes refuses to take the phony verdict lying down - even though his personal enquiry might have him lying down permanently...

Max Moreton is a rising culinary star and his Newmarket restaurant, The Hay Net, has brought him great acclaim and a widening circle of admirers. But when nearly all the guests who enjoyed one of his meals at a private catered affair fall victim to severe food poisoning, his kitchen is shuttered and his reputation takes a hit.

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.

Charles Todd is an English artist who is well known and respected for his renderings of sleek and athletic horses. What he now faces at his cousin Donald's house is also art - the art of a perfectly brutal murderer. Donald's home has been burglarized and his wife, Regina, is lying on her back dead, her face the color of cream. Donald is shattered, shocked, and a prime suspect.

Shell-shocked and missing a foot-lost to an IED during his tour of duty in Afghanistan, Captain Tom Forsyth has been sent "home" by the army and returns to his estranged mother's house. But Josephine Kauri, the "first lady of British racing", has always put the horses she trains first and her family last. Tom soon finds himself strained to the breaking point with his mother and stepfather. But there's another reason for the stifling tension at Kauri House Stables: Josephine is being blackmailed for a hefty sum every week - and forced to make her horses lose.

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.

Roland Britten, accountant and amateur jockey, awakens one morning to find he can’t move his hands—because he is tied up with netting, held captive where no light penetrates and no amount of yelling will get any attention. But why?

When English agent Gene Hawkins told his boss he'd forego his vacation to search for millionaire Dave Teller's prized missing stallion, he didn't know his retainer would include the attention of his boss's beautiful teenage daughter - or Teller's seldom sober wife. He also didn't know that a trail from London to New York to Las Vegas to California would lead eventually to murder.

The catastrophic power of a giant hurricane can raise coastal waves 30 feet high and blow through houses at devastating speeds. For TV meteorologist Perry Stuart, however, such predictions are hypothetical, as he chiefly predicts periods of English drizzle - until a fellow forecaster offers him a Caribbean hurricane-chasing ride in a small airplane as a holiday diversion. But a frightening accident teaches Stuart more secrets than wind speeds.

Architect and family man Lee Morris never gave much thought to the shares he inherited of the Stratton Park racecourse, the multi-million dollar property owned by the powerful Stratton family. His mother had first received the shares to keep her quiet about the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her first husband, Keith Stratton. Now, much to Lee's chagrin, he is being drawn into the thick of the Stratton family squabbles as they wage a furious debate over the future of the race track.

Fast-paced radio dramatisations of six of Dick Francis's classic racing thrillers, plus bonus documentary.

Three jockeys warned not to win their races turned into also-rans. Bill died when the sure-footed Admiral fell, Joe was scared rotten, and Alan York became the target of a vicious gang. But he wanted revenge and to hell with the risk.

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.

Sid Halley had one good hand and another made of metal. Five hundred pounds of horse had landed on him, directly ending his career as a brilliant jockey - and indirectly ending his marriage to the woman he loved. He had become a private investigator, quite a good one, though his new life could never erase the haunting memories of his past glories.

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.

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.

When a sick friend asks Edward Lincoln to investigate the comprehensive failure of a string of racehorses, he agrees to help out. But it is impossible for him to go about the task quietly and unnoticed because he is now a world-class star of action films, in which he always plays the hero. And the apparently easy survey of the string of racehorses blows him through a smokescreen into circumstances, where, to survive, he has to make himself become the man everyone else already thinks he is.

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.

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.

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.