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Hands Down

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When his friend turns up dead, apparently by suicide, then he can't resist the urge to investigate, assisted once again by Chicco. But when they start telling the jockey and trainers which horses to lay off in specific races, that is illegal.

Because the details of the plot would have had more time to leak out of context from my constantly replenished brain bucket of memories. As a side plot, there is some discussion about Sid's transplanted left hand and his feelings about it, as well as some marital tension regarding that hand. His wife and daughter have left for the Netherlands to see her parents leaving him free to dig to the bottom of this mystery. Life should be looking good but things start to sour when his wife decides to go home to be with her mother when she finds out that her father is dying. Sid demands the guy back down or he’ll pass all of the information he’s collected to the police and to the British racing authority.

Released 8th Nov 2022 by Crooked Lane Books, it's 304 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. Halley, though, gets involved into sorting out the agent extortion scheme without putting the careers of the jockey victims in jeopardy with the national racing authorities.

Ever since the death of his father, Felix's attempts to follow in his footsteps have been, in my opinion, uneven. This had a decent plot and a number of interesting characters but unfortunately they failed to gel into a good read, somehow I was completely disengaged and quite honestly it was boring. Nearing fifty and having much more to lose made Sid a more careful investigator but still a very persistent and intelligent one. As it turns out, he should have been more fired up; the next day, the guy's stable and a few horses go up in flames - and then, not long after he meets with Sid to explain what's going on, the man himself is found hanged. The first three were written by Dick Francis, but after a long life and very prolific writing career, he rode off into the sunset.Francis devises a subtle, clever scheme for the heart of the mystery, and he excels at making his broken lead credible and sympathetic. Someone is finding a way to rig horse races for their own financial gain and are blackmailing both jockeys and trainers to further their plot.

His former father-in-law Charles also has a role to play both as reluctant caretaker for Sid's dog and sounding board for Sid's thoughts.In 1996 I left Australia fr the first time, arrived in London and had to stay in accommodation for one night before moving to Sydenham for my course the following afternoon.

While I felt that the story started slowly and presented a more introspective Sid than that of earlier stories, the pace did pick up and engaged me in Sid's adventures. Sid Halley is asked by an former jockey/now trainer to help him stop a fraud perpetrated by jockeys' agents. He was amongst the first ‘adult’ reads that I explored at the time, and over the years I have read everything he’s written.Felix Francis is showing himself a worthy successor to his father (though some say it was Mom Francis that really wrote for Dick) once again in this Sid Halley mystery that goes into the weeds on betting on and throwing steeplechase horseraces in England and Scotland. There are only a handful of series, however well written, which keep me coming back for more year after year. Now he's back - decked out with a new but real hand courtesy of a donor that, with the help of anti-rejection drugs, is working better every day.

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