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Three Dick Francises
When I was in Anchorage last month I went to Title Wave, their huge used bookstore, and walked out with a large stack of books. Among other things, I acquired three new-to-me Dick Francises, which I've read over the past week, so here's my assessment from most to least enjoyable.
High Stakes - A wealthy racehorse owner realizes that his trainer is conning him, fires him, has his reputation unfairly smeared in revenge (in a way he can do nothing legal about without making it worse), and consequently comes up with a complicated plan to beat the con artist at his own game. This book was absolutely delightful, peak Dick Francis with horses galore, an upstanding hero who can't tell anyone he's innocent, an enjoyably resourceful and loyal (if not spectacularly memorable) cast of side characters, and a very fun and clever heist/shell game climax.
The antagonist (crooked trainer) is cheating his victims by training champion racehorses and then swapping in a slow, similar-looking ringer horse, using the ringer to rig the betting on races (because only he knows if the real, fast horse is running or not) and eventually making sure the real, fast horse is now his own and using it to win races and/or selling it for a profit.
The climax involves the hero talking all his friends into a shell game counter-con with three nearly identical horses, multiple horse trailers, and someone impersonating a police officer. It was great.
This book also, as is common for Francis books, has a hero with an unusual occupation; in this case his wealth comes from designing and patenting toys. I was impressed that Francis managed to come up with toys that sound like real toys, and could plausibly be household-name popular, without actually being real toys. They're sort of a cross between Erector sets and model trains, animatronic "collect them all" toys that can be put together on a powered base to form a model village in which the people move, the carousel horses go around, etc.
The Danger - Hero works for a for-profit private company, Liberty Market, that rescues kidnapping victims. Most of Francis's heroes are amateurs sucked into life-or-death circumstances, so it was an interesting change to have a hero who works in dangerous circumstances for a living, although he's not a particularly action-y guy and mainly specializes in hostage negotiation and counseling the victims afterwards. There's also a memorably fantastic side character, the hero's buddy/co-worker who is a foul-mouthed ex-special forces commando and a stone cold badass who can do things like free-climb vertical walls and specializes in stealing back kidnap victims from their kidnappers. I would totally read an entire series about Liberty Market.
The only thing I really didn't like about this book was that the climax was a disappointment compared to the rest. I think I'd almost have liked it better if it stopped about 2/3 of the way through, before the final location jump and the reveal of the main baddie's identity. The middle of the book, which involves trying to find and rescue a kidnapped child and then dealing with the aftermath, was fantastic.
The book opens with the hero in the middle of hostage negotiations for a kidnapped Italian heiress and jockey, who then becomes the love interest. Unfortunately I found Alessia hard to like. It's a tough set of circumstances for a character, since we meet her as a naked, drugged, traumatized kidnap victim and she spends most of the book being weepy, traumatized, and sad. But I also felt like it was hard to see what the hero sees in her, which is resilience, competence, and strength. She has a few good moments, but mostly she just felt kind of flat and blandly nice. (I did, however, love her aunt, a horse trainer who runs a stable employing a number of women and gives off lesbian vibes visible at 10,000 paces.)
As mentioned above, the middle part of the book was my favorite part and involves the hero, his delightful SAS friend Tony Vine, and Alessia trying to find and rescue a kidnapped toddler. Because the characters in this book are pros, they have access to a lot of high-end bugging and other equipment, again not something I'd want in every Dick Francis book but a nice change since his characters normally have to deal with cobbled-together makeshift resources. The aftermath, with Alessia and the hero helping the traumatized child and his mom, and the hero helping Tony cover up exactly how much illegal stuff they did in order to get the kid back, was also really great.
Frustratingly the climax felt pretty flat, although it should have been excellent - after being on the negotiation side, the hero is kidnapped himself and finds out what the other side of it is like. Unfortunately this part was just kind of ... not that great. The actual getting-caught is a huge idiot ball moment (dude!! you knew this guy was after you and knows who you are; you're supposed to be a professional!), he rescues himself and resolves the whole situation with a violent clash in which his only helper is someone we just met a couple of chapters ago, the other characters have completely disappeared from the book by this point and we never even get his friends' or love interest's reaction to him being kidnapped or freed, or anyone's reactions to finding out that the kidnapper has been a friend of Alessia's family all along. The climax was also more violent than Francis's tend to be, and I don't even think I'd have minded all that much if there was more emotional involvement, but it was just kind of ... there. (Also LOL at the DC suburb in which literally every businessman and housewife has guns and has no compunctions about shooting people or holding them at gunpoint. Like ... there are parts of the US where this is kinda-sorta true but I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that DC suburbia is not it, even in the 1970s.)
But I liked most of the rest of it; it was just marred by a lackluster ending. I do honestly wish he'd written more books about Liberty Market because I would totally read them, especially if it involved more of Tony Vine.
Twice Shy - I found parts of this very enjoyable, and really liked some of the characters (in fact, out of this collection of Dick Francises, this had the highest density of memorable side characters), but unfortunately my reaction to the book as a whole was intense dislike by the end, due to a lot of idiot-ball carrying and a resolution with the bad guy that I really hated.
The hero in this one is given a computer program by a programmer friend that can pick winning horses. Bad guys also want it and are willing to kill to get it. There's a fourteen-year timeskip in the middle of the book and it switches to a different protagonist and set of characters at that point, which is also the point when the idiot ball issues get really bad.
The main problem I had with this book is that there's no valid reason for *either* of the main protagonists, but especially the second one, not to involve the police more than they do, especially given the obvious penchant for violence of the people they're up against. In a lot of Francis's books, he sets it up in a way that makes it completely plausible that the protagonists have to solve the problem on their own (or else they do call the authorities and it doesn't help) but this book, IMHO, whiffed this totally. The point at which I developed a major case of side-eye was when the villain showed up hunting the second-half-of-book hero for revenge, smashes up his house with a baseball bat, breaks his girlfriend's arm, and makes it clear he's going to keep coming until he kills them. He's also an ex-con who tried to kill the hero's brother in the previous half of the book (which was what he was in prison for), so it's not like the police wouldn't believe them. At this point, the hero, instead of getting the guy arrested LIKE HIS FRIENDS KEEP TELLING HIM, locks him in the basement with a bucket and some food and goes out to retrieve the winner-picking computer program to give it to him so he'll go away and leave them alone.
Shockingly this cunning plan doesn't turn out all that well.
It was also frustrating because the part of the book where he's locked in the basement just goes on and on and ON (he's in there for days!) and this could have been really tense - in fact it *is* really tense - except for being an objectively BATSHIT way to handle a problem which is not justified in the text to nearly the extent that it ought to have been. There are characters who would do this! I do not for a hot second believe that a perfectly law-abiding jockey and his girlfriend would do this, however.
And after all of that, the conclusion is that the villain runs his car off the road, suffers a severe head injury that wipes his memory of hating the protagonists and also gives him short-term memory loss so he can never learn it again.
Reader, I hated it.
Despite all the plot disappointments, this book has a bunch of absolutely great side characters, like the resourceful elderly widow of the guy who came up with the winning horse-picking system in the first place, or the second hero's BFF, "Bananas," a quirky gourmand pub owner. The fourteen-year timeskip gives us a look at characters in very different stages of their lives, which was fun and isn't something you see in suspense novels all that often. But parts of it were just so bad!
High Stakes - A wealthy racehorse owner realizes that his trainer is conning him, fires him, has his reputation unfairly smeared in revenge (in a way he can do nothing legal about without making it worse), and consequently comes up with a complicated plan to beat the con artist at his own game. This book was absolutely delightful, peak Dick Francis with horses galore, an upstanding hero who can't tell anyone he's innocent, an enjoyably resourceful and loyal (if not spectacularly memorable) cast of side characters, and a very fun and clever heist/shell game climax.
The antagonist (crooked trainer) is cheating his victims by training champion racehorses and then swapping in a slow, similar-looking ringer horse, using the ringer to rig the betting on races (because only he knows if the real, fast horse is running or not) and eventually making sure the real, fast horse is now his own and using it to win races and/or selling it for a profit.
The climax involves the hero talking all his friends into a shell game counter-con with three nearly identical horses, multiple horse trailers, and someone impersonating a police officer. It was great.
This book also, as is common for Francis books, has a hero with an unusual occupation; in this case his wealth comes from designing and patenting toys. I was impressed that Francis managed to come up with toys that sound like real toys, and could plausibly be household-name popular, without actually being real toys. They're sort of a cross between Erector sets and model trains, animatronic "collect them all" toys that can be put together on a powered base to form a model village in which the people move, the carousel horses go around, etc.
The Danger - Hero works for a for-profit private company, Liberty Market, that rescues kidnapping victims. Most of Francis's heroes are amateurs sucked into life-or-death circumstances, so it was an interesting change to have a hero who works in dangerous circumstances for a living, although he's not a particularly action-y guy and mainly specializes in hostage negotiation and counseling the victims afterwards. There's also a memorably fantastic side character, the hero's buddy/co-worker who is a foul-mouthed ex-special forces commando and a stone cold badass who can do things like free-climb vertical walls and specializes in stealing back kidnap victims from their kidnappers. I would totally read an entire series about Liberty Market.
The only thing I really didn't like about this book was that the climax was a disappointment compared to the rest. I think I'd almost have liked it better if it stopped about 2/3 of the way through, before the final location jump and the reveal of the main baddie's identity. The middle of the book, which involves trying to find and rescue a kidnapped child and then dealing with the aftermath, was fantastic.
The book opens with the hero in the middle of hostage negotiations for a kidnapped Italian heiress and jockey, who then becomes the love interest. Unfortunately I found Alessia hard to like. It's a tough set of circumstances for a character, since we meet her as a naked, drugged, traumatized kidnap victim and she spends most of the book being weepy, traumatized, and sad. But I also felt like it was hard to see what the hero sees in her, which is resilience, competence, and strength. She has a few good moments, but mostly she just felt kind of flat and blandly nice. (I did, however, love her aunt, a horse trainer who runs a stable employing a number of women and gives off lesbian vibes visible at 10,000 paces.)
As mentioned above, the middle part of the book was my favorite part and involves the hero, his delightful SAS friend Tony Vine, and Alessia trying to find and rescue a kidnapped toddler. Because the characters in this book are pros, they have access to a lot of high-end bugging and other equipment, again not something I'd want in every Dick Francis book but a nice change since his characters normally have to deal with cobbled-together makeshift resources. The aftermath, with Alessia and the hero helping the traumatized child and his mom, and the hero helping Tony cover up exactly how much illegal stuff they did in order to get the kid back, was also really great.
Frustratingly the climax felt pretty flat, although it should have been excellent - after being on the negotiation side, the hero is kidnapped himself and finds out what the other side of it is like. Unfortunately this part was just kind of ... not that great. The actual getting-caught is a huge idiot ball moment (dude!! you knew this guy was after you and knows who you are; you're supposed to be a professional!), he rescues himself and resolves the whole situation with a violent clash in which his only helper is someone we just met a couple of chapters ago, the other characters have completely disappeared from the book by this point and we never even get his friends' or love interest's reaction to him being kidnapped or freed, or anyone's reactions to finding out that the kidnapper has been a friend of Alessia's family all along. The climax was also more violent than Francis's tend to be, and I don't even think I'd have minded all that much if there was more emotional involvement, but it was just kind of ... there. (Also LOL at the DC suburb in which literally every businessman and housewife has guns and has no compunctions about shooting people or holding them at gunpoint. Like ... there are parts of the US where this is kinda-sorta true but I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that DC suburbia is not it, even in the 1970s.)
But I liked most of the rest of it; it was just marred by a lackluster ending. I do honestly wish he'd written more books about Liberty Market because I would totally read them, especially if it involved more of Tony Vine.
Twice Shy - I found parts of this very enjoyable, and really liked some of the characters (in fact, out of this collection of Dick Francises, this had the highest density of memorable side characters), but unfortunately my reaction to the book as a whole was intense dislike by the end, due to a lot of idiot-ball carrying and a resolution with the bad guy that I really hated.
The hero in this one is given a computer program by a programmer friend that can pick winning horses. Bad guys also want it and are willing to kill to get it. There's a fourteen-year timeskip in the middle of the book and it switches to a different protagonist and set of characters at that point, which is also the point when the idiot ball issues get really bad.
The main problem I had with this book is that there's no valid reason for *either* of the main protagonists, but especially the second one, not to involve the police more than they do, especially given the obvious penchant for violence of the people they're up against. In a lot of Francis's books, he sets it up in a way that makes it completely plausible that the protagonists have to solve the problem on their own (or else they do call the authorities and it doesn't help) but this book, IMHO, whiffed this totally. The point at which I developed a major case of side-eye was when the villain showed up hunting the second-half-of-book hero for revenge, smashes up his house with a baseball bat, breaks his girlfriend's arm, and makes it clear he's going to keep coming until he kills them. He's also an ex-con who tried to kill the hero's brother in the previous half of the book (which was what he was in prison for), so it's not like the police wouldn't believe them. At this point, the hero, instead of getting the guy arrested LIKE HIS FRIENDS KEEP TELLING HIM, locks him in the basement with a bucket and some food and goes out to retrieve the winner-picking computer program to give it to him so he'll go away and leave them alone.
Shockingly this cunning plan doesn't turn out all that well.
It was also frustrating because the part of the book where he's locked in the basement just goes on and on and ON (he's in there for days!) and this could have been really tense - in fact it *is* really tense - except for being an objectively BATSHIT way to handle a problem which is not justified in the text to nearly the extent that it ought to have been. There are characters who would do this! I do not for a hot second believe that a perfectly law-abiding jockey and his girlfriend would do this, however.
And after all of that, the conclusion is that the villain runs his car off the road, suffers a severe head injury that wipes his memory of hating the protagonists and also gives him short-term memory loss so he can never learn it again.
Reader, I hated it.
Despite all the plot disappointments, this book has a bunch of absolutely great side characters, like the resourceful elderly widow of the guy who came up with the winning horse-picking system in the first place, or the second hero's BFF, "Bananas," a quirky gourmand pub owner. The fourteen-year timeskip gives us a look at characters in very different stages of their lives, which was fun and isn't something you see in suspense novels all that often. But parts of it were just so bad!
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Yes! I remember High Stakes fondly, including the toys, and it held up on re-read as recently as last year. I have the vague sense that I read The Danger at some point because the character dynamics ring a bell, but almost nothing about the actual plot. I may have missed Twice Shy and that sounds fine.
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I totally misread this title as "Three Dick Franchises" and was expecting a post about three series, each with its own group author sharing a pen name, about dicks.
I read Twice Shy years ago. I don't remember very much about it except that I shipped the hero/the heroine/Bananas.
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Honestly given what I do for a living, a post about dick franchises is not out of the question.
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But The Danger and High Stakes were really enjoyable, and agreed on the realistic and very entertaining-sounding toys in High Stakes. (I also always love an unjustly scorned character.)
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(I also have to admit that I kept finding the timeskip more distracting than it would be in a book that wasn't literally about computers, which change hugely every decade. Like ... did we *start out* in Francis's "now" and we've skipped ahead to the early 90s? Or did we start in the 70s and now we're in the 80s? Obviously Francis couldn't know that computers were going to be fantastically different in a decade, but of all the books to have a major timeskip in the middle ...)
Fortunately the others were both much better and this was the one I read in the middle, so it was bookended by far more enjoyable books!
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Choices were made.
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