But the journey is enjoyable and I found myself once again rooting for Sid's victory in both his professional and personal life. Reading her collection of books has stirred up a lot of memories, mostly of our shared love of reading. Hands Down is pure storytelling, wonderfully written, which had me hooked from the opening pages, it is a read which you need to know what is going to happen next and in which direction is the author going to take. Sid is approached in a parking lot after a race by two thugs but is rescued by several partying soldiers out for the night. In this sixth book featuring ex steeplechase jockey and racing investigator Sid Halley, first brought to the page by Dick Francis in 1965, Sid has a new transplanted left hand and a troubled marriage.

And he's married to his beloved Marina and has a nine-year-old daughter named Saskia who is the center of his existence. Life should be looking good but things start to sour when his wife decides to go home to be with her mother when she finds out that her father is dying. With enough backstory to fill in the blanks and enough twists and turns to keep you saying "just one more chapter", I was in Sid Halley's world and enjoying every page. It was all going smoothly than all of a sudden child SA comes out of now where completely out of the blue and it ruined the mood throughout.

Having Sid Halley back was so welcome, for the rest the author has a knack for making his characters believable and down to earth, even though you don’t know them there is a familiarity to them, you can relate to each. Instead he landed in the private investigation business, in hot pursuit of the miscreants of the British horse racing world that he can’t stop being a part of.

The drips and drops of details, even entire plots, that had precipitated into my brain would have splished and splashed into even smaller drops to be carried along with the churning river of drips from the thrilling (or not) pages of the hundreds of whodunnits I have read, mixing up the characters, settings, and plots until I wouldn’t be able to distinguish one from the other, or sometimes even forgetting that I had ever read it! Watching the news the following day, he sees that Bremner’s horse barn has gone up in flames, and several horses have been killed, including, perhaps, Bremner. There were several disparate plot threads and they crossed and intertwined and were sometimes difficult to keep track of.Felix Francis studied Physics and Electronics at London University and then spent seventeen years teaching Advanced-Level Physics. This was an engaging read, full of suspense, fast paced, gripping, looking at the underbelly of the racing world, but how are these masterminds controlling things without being caught? Hands Down is pure storytelling, wonderfully written, which had me hooked from the opening pages, it is a read which you need to know what is going to happen next and in which direction is the author going to take you.