Word: bonecrack
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...BONECRACK...
Francis' plots customarily run briskly over a fast, dry track, and Bonecrack, his latest, is no exception. It tells how a member of the European Mafia, with threat of muscle and mayhem, foists his sulky amateur rider-son on a professional British trainer. He orders that the boy is to ride the stable's best horses in a series of important races. The book is not absolutely first-rate Francis. It does not hold a tight enough rein on incredulity (a rare thing for Francis), and its crisis boils up too fast and fizzles out too bloodily (also...
...heroes, and their heirs and assigns, foiled pursuit in everything from Bentleys to borrowed bicycles. The true Francis classic (Dead Cert), pitted the jockey hero, up on a splendid horse named Admiral, against the forces of darkness who chivvied him about in a swarm of radio taxis. By contrast, Bonecrack's ride is modest. The trainer, galloping prodigally crosscountry on his best racer, tries to head off the sulky boy-jockey from inadvertent assassination by one of his Mafia father's goons...
Crisp Prose. "I was hurting far more than I would have believed possible," the trainer hero of Bonecrack reflects, after being worked over in Chapter I by two mysterious men in masks. The tone is typical of Francis. Though his people are regularly, often bizarrely, set upon by musclemen intent on altering the result of a horse race, their dramatically understated encounters somehow do not seem sadistic. Francis' heroes, among other things, have been hung up to freeze in icy tack rooms (Nerve) and had a broken hand rebroken with a poker (Odds Against). Yet they regularly turn...
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