Smokescreen

After production wraps on his latest film, British action hero Edward Lincoln (“Link”) looks forward to down time with his wife and children on their country estate. However, things don’t work out as he expects. A close family friend reveals that she has just months to live, and before she dies she wants him to go to South Africa to find out why the race horses she inherited from her sister are not performing as well as they should. Although Link rarely attends his own movie premieres, he sets up a publicity tour to provide a reason for his visit. Not long after Link’s arrival in South Africa, his life begins to resemble the action movies he stars in. He’ll have to be every bit as resourceful as the characters he plays on show more screen if he hopes to escape with his life.

This is a well-paced thriller with a sympathetic protagonist and a strong sense of place. Link stands out among other Francis heroes because he is happily married. I loved that about him. He’s also a good father who prioritizes the welfare of his children. I loved the unusual setting with scenes in a South African gold mine and a game reserve. Readers for whom horse racing is the biggest draw may feel shortchanged, but I’m not one of them. show less

Link is an action film star – no situation is too tough for him to handle as we see in the opening chapter where he is chained to the steering wheel of a car and left to die. Whoops – it’s only a movie scene.

He is also a happily married man with kids, including a disabled daughter. Like all Dick Francis heroes, he’s the sort of good man that goes out of his way to help others, so when a dying longtime friend asks him to go to South Africa to check on her mysteriously doing-poorly race horses, he goes.

But almost immediately he encounters near fatal accidents. And as he unravels the puzzle, he is chained to a car’s steering wheel and left to die – a brutal reimagining of the opening movie scene.

I believe that to really show more understand the plot, one would need to have knowledge of British inheritance tax laws. Although described in the book, I’m still a bit in the fog. I’m also a bit skeptical about how long one could live in a car in the blazing sun, given the recent concerns over toddler and animal deaths in closed cars.

But even a not-my-favorite Dick Francis is a good read. This one also has interesting details about South Africa, including a detailed chapter on hard rock gold mines. show less

Vintage Dick Francis, but set in South Africa. Compelling page turner of course, with more depth than your average airport thriller. Short and fun.

An enjoyable, and quick read, full of violence and suspense.

This had his usual intelligent, modest, tenacious, athletic well-mannered hero, this time a successful actor rather than a jockey. Like all of his mysteries, horse racing is involved, though here there is more action in a gold mine and the South African veldt than at the racetrack. It's interesting that in this book, unlike most of the other books by Dick Francis I've read, he's happily married, with children.

The part where he was trapped in a car, in the blazing hot sun, for days... and some of the lines from that novel stayed with me for days....

If you are the sort of reader who likes mysteries for the puzzle, don't start your Francis-reading with this one. It's more of a show more thriller, with only Lincoln's lack of detective skills keeping him in suspense. Whodunit's so clear that my only doubt was whether Francis was tricking me. I would recommend this more to those interested in psychology and character interactions.

*I read my local library's only copy of this novel, which was seriously printed in 1972. Needless to say, it was in pretty bad shape. But by the middle of the novel, all the dirty, smudged pages were forgotten, and I was hooked into yet another good, solid novel. show less

First time reader of Dick Francis, and an enjoyable one it was too. Very well written, characters were interesting and so was the description of going down a gold mine. Not without humour.

About average for the mid career Fracis novels, it feels dated and is only perepherally connected to horses as such. This time the random profession chosen to feature is an actor. His dying Aunt has some horses in S Africa that are performing poorly. As he plays such heroic characters on screen he must be able to investigate the matter for her. Despite his protestations to the contrary he does in fact heorically go out and investigate. Where upon he discovers various strange family connections and gets to visit a gold mine and Safari park. Such stereotypical attitudes are probably the hallmark of the book.

Most interestingly is probably the genuine delay of several hours to get an international call placed by the operator - something show more that will now make no sense to an entire generation of younger readers were they to stumble across this.

Entertaining enough, but predicatable and without the full excitment or charming characters that Francius can achieve at his best. show less

I very much enjoyed this Dick Francis novel. I have enjoyed ten thus far and this one comes a cut above some of the rest. There is a sense of joie de vivre mixed with which the Francises tell this tale. The setting of South Africa steps up wonderfully, too.