BREAK IN

After strong-selling digressions into finance, kidnapping, and the liquor business (Banker, The Danger, Proof), Francis is back with a jockey-hero and lots of racing-game atmosphere again: this new adventure—which also involves some slimy newspaper doings—reads like a mild, murder-less, very agreeable replay of such early Francis standouts as Enquiry and Bone-crack. The narrator-sleuth here is Kit Fielding, a 30-ish steeplechase jockey, unusually tall for the track (he must watch his weight maniacally) and highly successful. But Kit's pleasant status-quo quickly evaporates when big troubles descend on his beloved twin-sister Holly: someone seems determined to bring financial ruin—through vicious rumor-mongering—on Holly's cloddish yet decent husband Bobby Allardeck, a struggling racehorse trainer. Indeed, once nasty tidbits about Bobby's insolvency start appearing in the Daily Flag's gossip column, his fledgling business immediately starts unraveling. Soon, however, hero Kit begins to suspect that the real target of the rumor-campaign isn't Bobby but his estranged father Maynard Allardeck, a ruthless tycoon/philanthropist who has cruelly disinherited poor Bobby (because of marrying Holly despite a longstanding Fielding/Allardeck family feud). Is someone out to prevent Maynard from receiving the knighthood he longs for by darkening his public image? So it seems. And, while sparring violently with the thuggish Daily Flag staff (their weapons include stun guns!), Kit sets out to learn the ugliest secrets of Maynard's rise to conglomerate fortune—convinced, quite rightly, that one of Maynard's many take-over victims is responsible for the vengeance-by-rumor scheme. Francis fills out this plot—one of his thinnest ever—with a characteristic assortment of side-issues, vignettes, and personalities: Kit's nice romance with an American TV-news producer (the niece of a horse-owning princess); his races in various states of physical disrepair; his intense attachment (complete with telepathy) to twin-sister Holly, his problematic relationship with brother-in-law Bobby. So, while some readers may be disappointed by the relative placidity and predictability here, old Francis fans will find it all easy, comfy reading—from the noble, near-invincible hero to the monied villains and the ubiquitous horses.