Risk

Dick Francis did it again; he kept me on the edge of my seat. Because the protagonist is an accountant, I was especially interested as my daughter is one also. I did not figure out the reason for Britten's abduction until the author revealed it. Fascinating and satisfying. I want my daughter to read it.

Dick Francis never disappoints. He never writes the same story twice, though his protagonists all have in common some sort of inner battle. If you don't like to fly and need something to completely absorb your attention, you can always count on Dick Francis to provide a page-turner. Do another flier a favor when you finish and leave the book on a seat in the waiting area when you get off the plane. Great rainy-day reading. Francis always researches his topics carefully and even if you're not particularly enamoured of horses, you'll still enjoy a GOOD READ.

Most Dick Francis novels begin with a strange happenstance stumbled onto by an intrepid hero who soon finds himself beat up and bound, fighting to survive, before he solves the crime and gets away with the girl. This one began with a hero who wakes to find himself locked up, without knowing why. The hero, Roland Britten, is an accountant who rides racehorses as an amateur. During his incarceration, he goes over his entire life trying to figure out who locked him up. He finds he's been put in a sail locker on a boat, and manages a daring escape onto the island of Minorca, where a spinster named Hilary Pinlock helps him evade his captors. Hilary proves to be a valuable ally later in the story, as well. Upon returning to England, Roland begins an investigation into a few embezzlers his testimony had sent to prison, as well as returning to work and trying to work out some puzzling discrepancies in the accounts of some clients. After riding in another weekend race, Roland is kidnapped again for several days, and then mysteriously let go. The location of his prison provides a few more clues to his captors, and Roland keeps digging. He meets a trainer's daughter who catches his fancy, and spends time romancing her while unraveling the mystery. When he finally figures out who kidnapped him and why, he stages a meeting with the culprits, who have friends he hadn't counted on. Roland finds himself bound again while the villains escape. He is eventually rescued by his love interest and Hilary Pinlock, and explains the whole scenario, wrapping up the story. Like most Dick Francis novels, this one is peopled with colorful, English characters that liven up the darker violence and mystery. This one didn't disappoint at any turn.

In many ways this is a quintessential Francis novel, with a fairly normal, likeable hero put into a situation where he is subjected to physical and mental challenges. The plot here is pretty good, although somewhat far fetched. However, this novel varies from the typical successful Francis formuala by having a sexual interlude between the hero and a female supporting character quite early on in the story. This is unusual, since Francis' characters are typcially fairly chaste, but this has the addes uniqueness of having the supporting female character be an older woman who wants to experience sex and chooses the hero, barely recovered from a dangerous brush with criminal types, as her man. This is diverting mostly because it seems to me that it is so different from the norm! I was quite taken aback by this!

Dick Francis has a winning formula: he writes books about a young man of around 30, in a career most people might think is boring, but which turns out to be exciting. His hero is usually taken for granted and under-appreciated by his family, and under-employed, but in the course of the book proves he is far smarter, cleverer, and more observant than anyone supposed. Usually, there's a highly intelligent middle-aged career woman who recognizes his worth and helps him along. It's a formula, but the details that Francis provides makes it work every time.In this case, our hero is an accountant, an auditor. Many people would start to snore at the thought that auditing could be an exciting job; as a former auditor myself, who has since traded it in for the relative calm of a desk job, I was pleased to see him show how varied and interesting the job can be. Auditors have to know a great deal about a variety of industries, do a lot of travelling, and have highly analytical minds used to investigating small details and discrepancies that most people would not notice. (There might be a bit of bias on my part, of course.) All this means that an auditor winds up making a good investigator of mysteries, as well. Along with the details of Roland's regular job, and the details of horse-racing that are in every book, we also happen to find out a great deal about yacht-building. Such details are all through Francis's books; he seems to know about every possible job, and must collect details as much as most people collect lint. I always enjoy learning these details!In this particular book, we have some ambiguous people who turn out not to be bad guys, the person captaining the yacht that Roland first is stored on when kidnapped. Then, the bad guy turns out to be a total surprise, someone we don't suspect at all till the end is revealed. Nonetheless, once the details are pointed out, one goes "Of course!"