Abducted by two men, Neil Griffon discovers that unless he agrees to their unreasonable demands, they will destroy his father's precious horses and racing stable--and, ultimately, Neil himself.

This was written in an easy to read style and had Neil as a very likable character. It was a bit questionable why Neil didn’t get help from the police but besides that it gave Neil an interesting conflict to deal with. Neil also had a disappointing relationship with his father who always criticized or ignored his ideas and feelings. There were a few surprising revelations and an exciting ending. Overall, an enjoyable read. ( )

My first Dick Francis. I want to ride Archangel. ( )

Neil Griffon ran away from his horse trainer father’s domineering ways when Neil was a young teenager. But now, his father has been badly injured and Neil comes to his aid to run the business involving millions of dollars of horses until a highly reputable horseman can be found to take over.

But before that can happen, Neil is kidnapped. He is told that the kidnapper’s son must be taken into the racing stable and allowed to act as a top jockey, riding the favorite horse or the entire stable will be destroyed. To back up his threats, a horse has its leg broken. When Neil doesn’t please the kidnapping thug as to the way his boy is progressing, another horse dies.

Neil must stay and see it through.

It’s an interesting look at two very different dysfunctional father and son relationships: the first where the son resisted his father; the second where the father demands the unreasonable to indulge his son’s whim.

As in most of Francis’ novels the protagonist Neil is a good guy who also endures incredible amounts of pain.

But can he hold things together, using what is at best an amateur jockey backed by his sociopathic father, for the months until his own father can once more take the reins?

I was glad to see that even written in 1971 (fifty years ago!), there is a reasonably good women’s role as the head ‘lad’ who became the actual trainer was a talented woman. ( )

There are two themes that run through most if not all of Dick Francis’ acclaimed mysteries: All of them involve the sport of horse racing to a greater or lesser degree, and most of them feature protagonists with less than convivial family relationships. Both conditions turn up in Francis’ [Bonecrack] (1971), which I re-read recently as part of a group read in the 75-Book Challenge group.

Neil Griffon is a business wunderkind, who accumulated a fortune buying and selling antiques and went on to make a career out of diagnosing and advising struggling businesses. He has a polite but distant relationship with his father, a highly successful horse trainer in Newcastle. When his father suffers an accident that lands him in the hospital with a complicatedly broken leg, Neil steps in to keep the stable running until his father is on his feet again. With his business instincts, it doesn’t take Neil long to discover that the place is in financial difficulties, a fact his father has been hiding from everyone.

Before Neil has time to absorb all of this, he is kidnapped from his father’s office and forced to hire the mastermind’s son as an apprentice jockey, despite his utter lack of experience. On his own, Neil would be inclined to risk the consequences of refusing such extortion, but there’s his father and the stable’s shaky finances to consider, as well as the fact that the kidnappers cleverly threaten not his own life but those of his father’s horses. How Neil balances giving the kidnappers enough of what they want while finding ways to use the apprentice’s own complicated father-son relationship to his advantage, provides most of the novel’s interest.

This isn’t one of my favorite Francis novels. Because we don’t meet Neil’s father until he’s already laid up in hospital, it’s hard to get a sense of him as a fully formed human being. That makes the estrangement between him and Neil feel somewhat distant rather than visceral, and makes it harder to understand why Neil is so intent on solving his problem with the least amount of damage to his father’s business and reputation. And the mastermind criminal’s villainy is so broadly drawn as to seem cartoonish. But some secondary characters are appealing, including the stable’s female head groom. And Alessandro, aspiring jockey and son of a thug, undergoes the kind of personal transformation under subtle manipulation from Neil that makes him by far the most compelling character in the whole book.

A final note: I do not recommend this book to anyone who recoils at the depiction of animals being injured (a theme Francis would return to in 1987’s [Bolt]). The violence can seem jarring, especially at the hands of Francis, whose own love and respect for horses makes them full-fledged characters alongside the humans. ( )

Businessman Neil Griffon is filling in for his trainer father while the elder Griffon recovers from severe injuries from a car wreck. His plans to hire a temporary trainer are soon derailed when he is kidnapped and nearly killed. The kidnapper’s 18-year-old son wants to ride the champion horse Archangel in this year’s Derby, and it will be Neil’s job to make this happen. If Neil fails, the kidnapper will destroy the elder Griffon’s business. Neil has to figure out a way to save his father’s stables without compromising his integrity.

This was not my favorite Francis novel. I never really warmed up to Neil, and the bad guy was so over the top that he was more a caricature than a character. I did like that the head lad in the stables is female. This was probably groundbreaking at the time of its publication in 1971. ( )