Highly readable niche genre novel ( )

Twice Shy is told in two parts from the perspectives of two brothers: first the older one who is a physics instructor (and Olympic-caliber marksman), then the younger one who has always been horse mad but ended up being unable to pursue a jockey career and is trying his hand as business manager for a wealthy owner of many, many racehorses. It's a two-part story because first the older brother has a run-in with some bad guys, then years later so does the younger one, thanks to mistaken identity. It's about as good and interesting as any other Dick Francis story. A nice read for an airplane trip or a quiet, rainy Saturday morning. ( )

Francis always mixes horse-racing, brutality, and poetic justice, this time with computers in two related tales. ( )

One of Francis's better books, though of an odd structure.

Johnathon - competition rifle marksman, becomes entangled in the computerised betting scheme of a friend, and the tough guys who want to steal it for their own ends. The plot hinges on the 80's tape driven computer technology, which will not be understood by today's generation. The second half of the book features more or less exactly the same plot 14yrs on with the younger brother William, and the same other cahracters. Johnathon is out of reach in Canada, but the thugs still want this system. And this is the odd point - computers haven't changed much! whereas 14yrs really represents quite a dramatic shift in technology!

The story is well told, the characters of the brothers sufficiently different to make the same story work twice with two different outcomes. ( )

A lucrative computer betting system for horseracing, evolved by a professional gambler, is put on computer tapes. When these vanish, the guns and the heavies come out. Jonathan Derry, school physics teacher and expert target shooter, ends up with the tapes, and to protect his wife and friends, has to stop the killers. The computer details are quite dated, but interesting, and it's a good story. ( )