Book description
Peter Darwin was hoping for some quiet leave from the Foreign Office.
Instead he found himself in the village of his childhood - at the
service of a veterinary surgeon whose operating theatre was rapidly
acquiring an unwanted reputation as an abattoir. The sudden unexplained
death of a string of valuable racehorses from one small area in
Gloucestershire was a mystery the police couldn't solve. But Darwin was
local. He remembered the people and what was at stake... And now he know
enough to get himself killed...
Dick Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt
jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in
1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, most
famously on Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National. On his retirement
from the saddle, he published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens,
before going on to write forty-three bestselling novels, a volume of
short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott.
During his lifetime Dick Francis received many awards, amongst them
the prestigious Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger
for his outstanding contribution to the genre, and three 'best-novel'
Edgar Allen Poe awards from The Mystery Writers of America. In 1996 he
was named by them as Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement. In
1998, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and
was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2000.
Dick Francis died in February, 2010, at the age of 89, but he
remains one of the greatest thriller writers of all time.
