Second Wind

I love most Dick Francis books, but not this one. While most of his books center around horse racing, this one just has it mentioned as an aside, and maybe this is where the book goes wrong. There never seemed to be a single plot, or maybe the plot got diverted on too many tangents. I don't know. A lot was going on in the book, and most of it hardly seemed connected. This book's main character was a meteorologist, and it was well researched, but maybe too well, because it bogged down in places, and a lot of loose threads. Not my favorite.

Second Wind starts off like a typical Dick Francis novel: A random assortment of characters shows up at a Stately Home of England for a swanky weekend lunch and a prized racehorse ends up poisoned. But before you can button up your tweeds and pet the corgi, it switches to a meteorological adventure when two BBC weathermen decide to spend their vacation flying through a Caribbean hurricane.

In the course of bringing these two storylines together, Francis drags the reader on a rambunctious trip from Newmarket to Florida mansions to the Grand Caymans to a mysterious island of dubious ownership. It is not as tight a plot as Francis usually provides, and there is a lot of ink spent on weather science, but the loose ends get tied up for a show more satisfactory ending.

Also posted on Rose City Reader. show less

As always, the Dick Francis novels are riveting. I love the way the author's main character is very good at his career and this time, he is a meteorologist. Francis always gives the reader interesting details about the character's career and I love that about his books. This is perhaps the only book of his that I have read that actually has very little about horses. There are some interesting facts about cows. (I know that we as cattle producers usually can't milk one without a stanchion, which happens in this book but that is okay) I love his character development. You really care about almost every one. It is refreshing to find out which ones are good guys and which ones are bad guys, or girls as the case may be. Well done!

I read this book when it first came out, and really enjoyed it then. Listening to it as an audio book was just as enjoyable. Michael Page doesn't have quite the voice range of Tony Britton (the narrator of other Dick Francis audio books I've listened to), but he was easy to listen to and added to the story. This novel features horses in only a very minor way, but has a great main character, a BBC weather forecaster who gets into loads of trouble after the plane he is in crashes after flying through the eye of a hurricane. Francis worked with a real BBC weather man in doing research for the book, and the facts one can glean about weather forecasting, hurricanes and surviving a crash on a desert island are an added bonus to the mystery. show more In fact, the mystery in this Francis novel is a little hard to fathom, and is one of the weaker plots for a Dick Francis book. It had something to do with selling nuclear bomb-making material, and really didn't make much sense. I'm still giving this one four stars, because I liked all the side stories, and the flying through a hurricane part, and all the minor characters. show less

A very minor mention of horse racing, but it's there. This book is mostly about the intrigue of a private island and what mystery surrounds the people who own (or don't own) the place. Second Wind was my first Dick Francis book and I have many more to go before I can judge this against any of his other books, but the story was interesting. There were some times when I found myself frustrated at the writing style or annoyed with the main character's seeming stupidity (he had to have people repeat things to him a lot) but overall I enjoyed figuring out who had what part to play in the events that unfolded.

Have not read Francis in long time but this is certainly not one of his best. Plot is weak and characterizations very shallow which makes for a fairly boring read.

Unlike any other Dick Francis novel I've read, and full of very unlikely and hard-to-believe developments. The horse racing connections are there, but peripheral. DF would do better to stick to his normal fare...