Twice Shy

An adventurous two-part format for Dick Francis. Unfortunately, while the first part is solid Dick Francis the second part is preposterous.

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 show more sufficiently different to make the same story work twice with two different outcomes. show less

About 15 pages in I realized that I had read this before. Granted it was probably 30 years ago. The point is, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading Dick Francis. His writing style is just so each and conversational. I probably read 8 or 10 of his books by the time I was 15 (not to imply that these are kids books, I've just always read a lot and these are the books my Grandparents had around the house). This book is particularly quaint due to the fact that computers play a large part of the story, and given it was written in 1982, the height of technology at the time. Great!

I really liked the first half of the novel, and gave I four stars. The novel is split in two, and the second half wasn't as good imo. I gave the second half 3 stars.
The narrator of the first half had a rich, plummy English accent, and was very enjoyable (Simon Prebble). The second narrator (Steven Crossly) sounded like a little like a know-it-all, rich young man from one of those well-to-do schools that teach all the boys to be prigs. He was less enjoyable, but not bad enough to stop listening to. And, he rarely yelled, like the narrator from the last novel I listened to (I am not a serial killer).

This was the first novel I've ever read by Dick Francis, and although the plot wasn't particularly earth shattering and didn't always make sense, I still found the novel to be enjoyable. The characters were interesting and easy to relate to, and Angelo, the antagonist, although not a very deep character, was certainly a dangerous one. I thought not every aspect of the plot was well thought at, and at times I didn't really feel a strong sense of danger for the characters. Despite it's flaws, Twice Shy was enjoyable.
Carl Alves - author of Two For Eternity

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.

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.