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FRONT RUNNER
by Felix Francis
Putnam, October 2015
384 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0399168230


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

FRONT RUNNER is Felix Francis's fast-paced and well-constructed sequel to DAMAGE, the first novel featuring British Racing Authority investigator Jeff Hinkley. Francis once again pulls off extending the spirit of his father's long string of successful horse racing mystery novels quite nicely.

Hinkley is contacted by a jockey of huge popularity and star status who has been trapped by a blackmailer into throwing races. When Hinkley goes to meet the jockey to discuss how to extricate him from this mess, Hinkley is quickly locked into a sauna by an unseen assailant and left to cook to death. In a scene reminiscent of the old TV show MacGyver, Hinkley cleverly breaks free but all he is able to discover is that the jockey is now dead, maybe a suicide, burned beyond recognition in his own car. Hinkley doubts the suicide part -- there have to be better ways, surely -- and off we go!

Hinkley's love interest in DAMAGE has left but the family story continues with Hinkley's sister Faye continuing her battle with cancer and his not quite comfortable relationship with her husband. If there is a flaw in the writing, it is in the arena of back story. There were one or two times when Hinkley visited Faye that I thought that Francis was self-plagiarizing from DAMAGE (and I checked and he was not). It was just too repetitive. It would be better if there were more kinds of shared moments, a developing and shifting relationship. But that is pretty minor: Francis will get better at this part of the writing process. He is already light-years ahead of where he was when he began writing these mysteries on his own.

The plotting is tight and very like the kind of wonderful work that Francis' father Dick was famous for. The characters are not yet of the same high caliber but they are good and are growing in the right directions and there are enough of them from all walks of life that there is room to spread the suspicions far and wide. The horse racing world is as familiar to the younger Francis as it was to his dad and as a backdrop for murder and mayhem it is hard to beat. Overall, this continuation of the imagination of Dick Francis is looking like a very good idea.

My enthusiasm is growing and I look forward to more.

§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.

Reviewed by Diana Borse, October 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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