Arctic Light

I picked up a stack of Dick Francis in a used bookstore on my trip in May, and I read them all back to back. As the last time I did this, I'll sort them from most to least enjoyable. (Based mostly on Vibes, tbh.)

Longshot - Every writer of thriller and mystery presumably has one country house mystery in them, and this is a country house mystery, Dick Francis style. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck writer ghostwriting a memoir of a famous horse trainer, who is evicted from his literal freezing garret just in time to move in with the subject of the biography in his big old country-house stable/manor - and walks right into the aftermath of a murder trial.

I hugely enjoyed it; the only thing that stops it from being one of my small number of all-time favorites Francises is some uneasiness surrounding the actual resolution to the murder. But it kept me guessing throughout; I really enjoyed how unpredictable the plot and characters were, had no idea who did it, and I also really enjoyed that the plot picks up not merely after the murder, but after the trial, and hero has absolutely NO interest in solving a murder - he's here to write a book! He just keeps finding clues and/or stumbling into the middle of someone else's coverup shenanigans. He also has a really unusual skill set - his usual area is writing wilderness survival guides, which gives him a vast array of hypothetical survival knowledge that obviously comes into play at the various points in the plot.

I loved everything about this book except the last couple of chapters. They didn't ruin the book for me, but it was a lackluster ending to a book I otherwise thoroughly loved.

Spoilers

When the killer was revealed, I didn't believe he could or WOULD have done what he did at the climax, which involves esoteric skill that's completely outside his skill set - basically he builds a bow and arrow and hunts the hero in the woods with it; it was a great scene, but even if he COULD do it, I don't think it would be how he'd choose to kill someone. This wasn't the thing that bothered me most, though, which was a generally uneasy tone surrounding the entire resolution. The hero decides to never tell anyone who actually did it for reasons I found somewhat hard to swallow (the killer commits suicide and the hero doesn't want to upset the guy's wife by letting her know that her husband killed or tried to kill multiple people! no!! I would have wanted to know!), and then to add insult to injury, there's a final few paragraphs that imply he never saw any of these people again, which really punctured the otherwise thoroughly enjoyable dramatic bonding under pressure in the book. Boo. But the rest of it was so good!

Shattered - The protagonist is a glass sculptor who accidentally acquires a video tape that may contain the secret to a murder - except the tape is stolen before he even figures out there's anything special about it, which leads to several different groups of people trying to hunt him down and get it back. And it's not even the only tape full of mysterious secrets that's floating around! The hero isn't even sure which of the MULTIPLE mysterious video tapes is the one he had, or where any of them went; all he knows is that people are willing to kill him to get them back.

This is a strangely unmemorable book considering how much plot there is, and in fact I had trouble remembering enough plot details to write this up - it's sort of bog-standard Francis (horse racing, check; maguffin containing horse-related secret, check; unusual hero occupation; pretty love interest who is extremely interested in hearing all about the hero's unusual occupation, etc) but it was tense and fun and full of interesting secrets and details of of glass blowing, with a nicely developed mystery that really did keep me guessing and a tense finale. So: kinda basic Francis, but good basic Francis.

Edited to add: I think my most substantive complaint is that I would have liked the mystery to relate more closely to the hero's occupation, because it almost feels like it *should*, but it really doesn't; he could have done literally anything and it wouldn't have changed the plot. It kinda feels like an edit to bring all of the book's various strands together more tightly (the multiple video tapes, the hero's job, etc) would have taken it from good-but-unmemorable to really stellar. But it was fun.


Rat Race - I felt like I should have liked this book more than I did. It's got pilots, it's got a lonely hero who won't admit he's lonely and gets adopted by his love interest and her family ... and I sort of felt "meh" about it for reasons that I couldn't quite figure out. It felt like all the pieces were there for a book I should really enjoy but then I just kind of didn't like it as much as I did the above two, even though I liked the characters. It does have some excellent airplane sabotage and a really nice midair rescue scene in which the pilot hero has to talk a less experienced pilot in another plane with malfunctioning equipment through an emergency landing that was exciting and clever, and it has some nice character interaction.

I'm pretty sure some of my lackluster reaction to this book is because it turned out I've read it before and forgot, so kept getting vague flashes of memory, just enough to spoil a lot of the plot. I want to reread this book at some point when I haven't just read a pile of other Francis and see if I like it better.


Risk - My least favorite of an otherwise fairly strong bunch, and the only one I really didn't like. This book has a killer opening (the hero wakes up with a headache, tied up in the dark) and a really engaging first couple of chapters, and then goes straight off a cliff when he manages to rescue himself from his kidnappers (in a really thrilling escape scene) and then goes right back to his everyday life as a tax accountant.

Thing one: not even Dick Francis can make tax accountancy interesting, and we hear a lot about it. Thing two: KNOWING that someone is trying to kidnap him, the hero proceeds to make endless stupid decisions that more than once made me put the book down and simply stare at the wall. The book also contains a lot of philosophical musing from the hero on how high taxes naturally encourage even honest men to tax fraud, how overly high taxes have driven all the rich people out of Britain, and tax rates need to be lowered before the country goes to hell in a handbasket. I don't read Francis for the politics! Especially these politics! And finally, the thing I often enjoy about many of Francis's books is the way he handles ensembles (either isolated heroes learning to connect with people, or those who already have a handful of people they're extremely loyal to) and this just doesn't really have either of those; the hero does develop a couple of love interests, but is frustratingly disconnected from everyone around him.

... I decided to reread the Sid Halley books. Already read: Odds Against (1965), Whip Hand (1979), Come to Grief (1995), and I'm currently reading Under Orders, (2006).

( Not very spoilery brief thoughts )

Somehow Smokescreen had never gotten on my radar at all, even though I've read quite a bit of Dick Francis and had others recommended to me. In this case it came up on my Kindle screen as a recommendation, and I ended up absolutely loving it. In fact, this is probably one of my favorite Francis books ever. I finished it and immediately went back to reread it from the beginning.

This is especially impressive because this book begins with a narrative trope I absolutely hate, a bait-and-switch opening. And this one annoyed me in particular because I had bought the book on the basis of it - in the opening pages, the hero is handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car in the desert, struggling to free himself. I was intrigued. I bought the book. Two paragraphs later, the director yells "Cut!" So it started off with one strike against it. Having read the whole book, however, I'm really impressed at how thoroughly the seemingly bait-and-switch opening ends up being tied to the rest of the book - thematically, plotwise, and in terms of character relationships.

Like all(?) of Dick Francis's books, horse racing is involved, but the book takes the protagonist out of Francis's usual English setting into South Africa. The protagonist - Edward Lincoln, Link to his friends - is an actor whose honorary aunt/godmother has asked him to look into the unusually bad performance of her South African racehorse stable. He travels to investigate under the cover of a press tour, and soon begins to experience mysterious accidents that may or may not be attempts on his life. But with the entire stable acting suspicious, as well as being embroiled in the snakes' nest of the press tour (which includes a sleazy promotor, a director who hates him, and a variety of other suspects) there's no shortage of not just suspects but motives as well. Are the murder attempts trying to stop the stable investigation, a series of publicity stunts gone wrong, someone trying to settle a personal grudge, or something else entirely?

This is actually one of the more genuinely mysterious Francis whodunnits that I've read. I spent most of the book with absolutely no idea who among the relatively large cast were trustworthy - and in fact a lot of them aren't, but in very different ways, which makes the entire thing very tense. And yet there's a lot of genuine camaraderie, often with unexpected people, and an absolutely spectacular hurt/comfort-heavy climax that I thoroughly loved. Francis's books tend to go heavy on the "h" rather than the "c" - his characters go through hell, but don't often have a lot of aftermath for it other than just ending up in the hospital. But this one has a lot more than usual, necessarily due to the timing/location/nature of what happened to the protagonist, and it is entertainingly awkward and clumsy while also very sweet. This book is the very definition of the Hurt/Comfort Exchange tag "Awkward attempts at comforting are actually very comforting."

Good use is also made of the setting, with vivid descriptions of, among other places, a gold mine and a game preserve. The political aspects are there in the background; the book definitely isn't about that, probably for the best as it's written by a middle-aged white British guy, but the way it was touched on felt natural to me. (This was written in the early 1970s, so some of the descriptions are a bit dated, but not - imho, for whatever it's worth - too badly.)

I would totally nominate this book for Yuletide if I hadn't missed the deadline, WOE. Maybe next year! Anyway, I loved it, and there's a lot I want to talk about that I can't talk about without spoiling the entire plot, so I'll do another post for that a bit later. Or maybe in the comments.

EDIT: There are now considerably more detailed spoilers in comments!