Shattered [Paperback]

Few writers can lay claim to having made a genre entirely their own, but the racing thriller remains unassailably Dick Francis territory. And Shattered, as smoothly crafted a piece of entertainment as anything he has produced, is a reminder that despite various pretenders to the throne, he retains his crown--even the kafuffle regarding the authorship of his books (his wife apparently lent a hand at times) only increased his profile, with readers seemingly indifferent to this revelation. What is his secret? Primarily, of course, it's the author's finely honed narrative skills that immediately mark him out as a master entertainer--thrillers such as Rat Race, Smokescreen and Trial Run bristle with energy and momentum. The ace in the hole is that satisfying sense of insider knowledge in his plots, however implausible they are. Shattered once again conveys that the equestrian world is quite as dangerous as Colin Dexter's Groves of Academe: jockey Martin Stukely dies after a fall in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, and his friend, artist Gerald Logan, finds that the dead man has a connection to a stolen videotape with mysterious (and highly valuable) contents. Logan is more familiar with the problems of glass-blowing than violence and extortion, but he is soon undergoing a crash course in survival techniques as some very malignant heavies target him.

The protagonist of Shattered is only peripherally connected with the racing world, and this broader palette has resulted in a signal recharging of the batteries. The lean, unfussy narrative has the customary race-to-the-tape motion, but Logan is a nicely judged semi-hero, convincingly at sea (as most of us would be) in very dangerous waters. And, as always, the prose makes its mark with a commendable directness:

The horse fell at the peak of his forward-to-win acceleration and crashed down at thirty or more miles an hour. Winded, he lay across the jockey for inert moments, then rocked back and forwards vigorously in his struggle to rise to his feet. The fall and its aftermath looked truly terrible from where I watched on the stands and the racecourse doctor, though instantly attending him from his following car, couldn't prevent the fast gathering group of paramedics and media people from realising that Martin Stukely, though semi-conscious, was dying before their eyes. They glimpsed the blood frothing out of the jockey's mouth, choking him as the sharp ends of broken ribs tore his lungs apart.

--Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Francis's latest may be one of his less memorable rides, but even at 80, the old master proves he can still go all out in the final stretch. The hero here is Gerard Logan, a dashing English bachelor who owns and operates his own glassblowing shop in a charming village in the Cotswolds, popular with other artisans and tourists. Logan's problem is that his good friend, jockey Martin Stukely, gave him a videotape shortly before dying in a fall during a steeplechase at Cheltenham racetrack. That videotape is now missing, stolen by a tall, bearded gent who made off with it while Logan's back was turned. Now, a crew of thugs wants the tape. They are led by the cruel, aptly named Rose Payne, a ruthless bookmaker who knows what's on the tapeAmedical breakthrough secrets worth millionsAand will do anything to get it. Logan tries to reason with Payne, saying he no longer has the video, and besides, he doesn't even know what it contains. But Rose won't give up. She and her crew beat up Logan on several occasions, viciously trying to break his wrists so he can no longer practice his craft. Logan, no slouch when it comes to payback, finally mounts an all-out defense that includes not only physical reprisals, but also a crafty recovery of the missing object. Francis's 41st novel (To the Hilt; 10 Lb Penalty; etc.) lacks the pounding drive of his best efforts, and several elements of the plot are hard to swallow without cutting the author a lot of slack. Yet the spirited repartee, cleverly laid cues, infectiously likable characters and bang-up finale are all vintage Francis, and the fascinating glimpses the novel furnishes into the glassblowing trade are a bonus. 300,000 first printing. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Gerard Logan is given a package containing an unlabeled videotape left to him by his friend, the late Martin Stukely, a renowned jockey who had just been killed by a fall during a trophy race at Cheltenham Races. However, before Logan can see what's on the tape, it's stolen. He thinks it was just taken when his shop was robbed, as the shop's cash was gone, too. When he finds that Stukely's house has been burglarized and every videotape there missing, he begins to wonder what was on this mysterious video. But, as the attacks on Logan continue and accelerate in violence, it looks like the only way to save himself is to find the lost tape. Excellently read by Martin Jarvis, Shattered is an entertaining mystery from start to finish, the kind of story we've come to expect from the three-time Edgar Award-winning Francis. Sure to be popular with mystery fans; highly recommended for all public libraries. Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In his forty-first mystery, Francis introduces a new hero, a professional glassblower, thinly connected to the racing world by the crystal trophies he designs and by his friendship with Britain's top steeplechase jockey. Hero Gerard Logan, however, is very much in the mold of Francis front-runners in his stoicism and resourcefulness. Logan's jockey friend is killed at Cheltenham Races when his horse misses a fence and crushes him to death. Logan, still reeling from shock, has a mystery literally thrust into his hands when his late friend's valet gives him a videotape the jockey claimed could only be seen by Logan. Before Logan can view it, the tape is stolen from his shop in the Cotswolds. It soon becomes evident, as the jockey's home is ransacked and his wife and children gassed unconscious, and Logan's own home is stripped of all videotapes, that this particular tape is a coveted item. Logan is forced into discovering just how valuable the tape is, a search that involves unmasking a corrupt research scientist and, as in all Francis capers, encountering great physical danger. A top-notch thriller, fascinating for both the way it makes the exotic science of glassblowing relevant to solving the mystery and the skill with which Francis injects the ordinary world of the hero with bracing doses of paranoia. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

This is a writer who has won just about every mystery award there is.... -- Publisher Weekly, September 25, 2000 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

When jockey Martin Stukely dies after falling in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen video tape. Logan, half artist, half artisan, is a glass blower on the verge of widespread acclaim for the originality and ingenuity of his work. Long accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass and in maintaining a glass-making furnace at never less than eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, Logan is suddenly faced with a series of unexpected and terrifying new threats to his business, his courage and his life. Believing the missing video tape to hold some sort of key to a priceless treasure, and wrongly convinced that Logan knows where to find it, a group of villains sets out to force from him the information he doesn`t have. Narrowly escaping these attacks, Logan reckons that to survive he must himself find out the truth. The journey is thorny, and the final race to the tape throws more hurdles and more hazards in Logan`s way than his dead jockey friend could ever have imagined. Glass shatters. Logan doesn`t...but it`s a close run thing.

Dick Francis has written forty-one international bestsellers and is widely acclaimed as one of the world's finest thriller writers. His awards include the Crime Writer's Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the crime genre, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Tufts University of Boston. In 1996 Dick Francis was made a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement and in 2000 he recieved a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

It was at the last fence of all that Tallahassee uncharacteristically tangled his feet. Easily ahead by seven lengths he lost his concentration, hit the roots of the unyielding birch and turned a somersault over his rider, landing his whole half-ton mass upside down with the saddle-tree and his withers crushing the rib cage of the man beneath.

The horse fell at the peak of his forward-to-win acceleration and crashed down at thirty or more miles an hour. Winded, he lay across the jockey for inert moments, then rocked back and forwards vigorously in his struggle to rise again to his feet.

The fall and its aftermath looked truly terrible from where I watched on the stands. The roar of welcome for a favourite racing home to a popular win was hushed to a gasp, to cries, to an endless anxious murmur. The actual winner passed the post without his due cheers and thousand pairs of binoculars focused on the unmoving black and white chevrons flat on the green December grass.

The racecourse doctor, though instantly attending him from his following car, couldn't prevent the fast gathering group of paramedics and media people from realising that Martin Stukely, though still semi-conscious, was dying before their eyes. They glimpsed the blood sliding frothily out of the jockey's moth, choking him as the sharp ends of broken ribs tore his lungs apart. They described it, cough by groan, in their news reports.

The doctor and paramedics loaded martin just alive into the waiting ambulance and as they set off to the hospital they worked desperately with transfusions and oxygen, but quietly, before the journey ended, the jockey lost his race.
Priam, not normally a man of emotion, wept without shame as later he collected Martin's belongings, including his car keys, from the changing rooms. Sniffing, blowing his nose, and accompanied by Lloyd Baxter who looked annoyed rather than grief-stricken, Priam Jones offered to return me to my place of business in Broadway, though not to my home in the hills, as he intended to go in the opposite direction from there, to see Bon-Bon; to give her comfort.

I asked if he would take me on with him to see Bon-Bon. He refused. Bon-Bon wanted Priam alone, he said. She had said so, devastated, on the telephone.

Lloyd Baxter, Priam added, would now also be offloaded at Broadway. Priam had got him the last available room in the hotel there, the Wychwood Dragon. It was all arranged.

Lloyd Baxter glowered at the world, at his trainer, at me, at fate. He should, he thought, have won the gold trophy. He had been robbed. Though is horse was unharmed, his feelings for his dead jockey seemed to be resentment, not regret.

As Priam, shoulders drooping, and Baxter, frowning heavily, set off ahead of us towards the car park, martin's changing-room valet hurried after me, calling my name. I stopped, and turned towards him, and into my hands he thrust the lightweight racing saddle that, strapped firmly to Tallahassee's back, had helped to deal out damage and death.

The stirrups, with the leathers, were folded over the saddle plate, and were kept in place by the long girth wound round and round. The sight of the girth-wrapped piece of professional equipment, like my newly dead mother's Hasselblad camera, bleakly rammed into one's consciousness the gritty message that their owners would never come back. It was Martin's empty saddle that set me missing him painfully.

Eddie, the valet, was elderly, bald and, in Martin's estimation, hardworking and unable to do wrong. He turned to go back to the changing room but then stopped, fumbled in the deep front pocket of the apron of his trade and, producing a brown-paper-wrapped package, called after me to wait.

'Someone gave this to Martin to give to you,' he shouted, coming back and holding it out for me to take. 'Martin asked me to give it back to him when he was leaving to go home, so he could pass it on to you ... but of course ...' he swallowed, his voice breaking ... 'he's gone.'

I asked. 'Who gave it to him?'

The valet didn't know. He was sure, though, that Martin himself had known, because he had been joking about it being worth a million, and Eddie was clear that the ultimate destination of the parcel had been Gerard Logan, Martin's friend.

I took the package and, thanking him, put it into my raincoat pocket, and we spent a mutual moment of sharp sadness for the gap we already felt in our lives. I supposed, as Eddie turned to hurry back to his chores in the changing room and I continued into the car park, that I might have gone to the races for the last time, that without Martin's input the fun might have flown.

Piram's tears welled up again at the significance of the empty saddle and Lloyd Baxter shook his head with disapproval. Priam recovered enough however to start Martins' car and drive it to Broadway where, as he'd intended, he off-loaded both me and Lloyd Baxter outside the Wychwood Dragon and then departed in speechless gloom towards Bon-Bon and her fatherless brood.

Lloyd Baxter paid me not attention but strode without pleasure into the hotel. During the journey from the racecourse he'd complained to Priam that his overnight bag was in Priam's house. He'd gone by hired car from Staverton airfield, intending to spend the evening at Priam's now-cancelled New Year's Eve party, celebrating a win in the Gold Coffee Cup before flying away the following morning to his thousand-acre estate in Northumberland. Priam's assertion that, after seeing Martin's family, he would himself ferry the bag to the hotel, left Tallahassee's owner unmollified. The whole afternoon had been a disaster, he grumbled, and in his voice one could hear undertones of an intention to change to a different trainer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This novel, published shortly before Dick Francis announced his retirement, is a winner for both Francis and narrator Martin Jarvis. In it, a day at the track turns dangerous for glassblower Gerard Logan when his jockey friend dies from a fall, leaving Logan a mysterious videotape reputedly "worth millions." In his reading of the first-person tale, Jarvis expertly conveys a range of emotions--from fear and anger over a series of attacks to the pure joy of a job well done in the glassworks. Character voices, although less important here, are also handled well. Jarvis keeps the story moving briskly as he builds toward the tense final confrontation. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.