All good stuff. A cracking adventure yarn with plenty of twists and turns along the way. Well written with some interesting and well drawn characters. A top class, easy reading crime drama.

Predictable

I felt it was predictable. After hero got beat up the first time I expected couple more beat downs and then the solution. Predictable.

This was disappointing. You almost get what is expected from a Dick Francis novel, a loveable Hero, a mystery connected to horse racing and learning about a new Trade. Gerard Logan is a glass blower, who is remotely connected to horse racing because of his friendship with a Jockey. The entire mystery around stolen video tapes and Logan getting involved didn't make any sense. None of the other characters did anything to justify their presence. The villains were caricatures. Don't know why the GF was a Police Constable when she did nothing to help the Hero whenever he was in danger.
The plot lacked logic. Computers, CDs, floppy disks existed in 2000. Then why would vital information be there only on 1 video cassette?
The trail of the video tapes was complex but he drills this through the reader by repeating to atleast to 3 different people.

He has done a good research on glass blowing and it shows. The action scene in the end excellent. The book is good in parts, but fails as a whole.

Don't read this book, if you have never read a Dick Francis before. This book has none of the brilliance as seen in his early novels. But this is still better than the best books by some of the popular thriller novelists.

According to an article in the Telegraph late last year, both Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were big fans of Dick Francis (it claims he was Larkin's favourite novelist together with Thomas Hardy). What better endorsement needed to treat myself to an escapist crime caper?

Well, it's certainly a page-turner with an interesting cast of characters both from within and outside the world of horse racing (Francis had been a highly successful jockey before turning to writing) and the writing style is deceptively simple. While it kept me interested and at times gripped, it didn't hold the same fascination as the more psychological crime novels of P D James and Ruth Rendell which are often more interested in the "why" than the "how". That gives their characters more depth - I did find some of these a little stereotypical and 2D. Nevertheless a good escapist read for a summer day that's too hot to do much else!

One of the reviews I read said this was one of the most complex books Dick Francis ever wrote - I mostly LOVE anything he has written but this book left me cold. I felt it was convoluted and stilted - it just didn’t jell and I didn’t like most of the characters - good or evil ones.

This book is definitely a slow burn, and I don't know if it's just been a while, or the story dragged far more than his other stuff, but I remember enjoying his mysteries more.

Many aspects of the book felt like they were trying too hard to be witty and were verbose at the very least. At one point the narrator tells us that he's figured out something, but doesn't reveal what that something is for at least several pages, which feels less like a reveal and more like we're being purposefully kept in the dark in order for the "aha" to happen. Unfortunately, after the events we witness on the page, the reveal is...lackluster.

The information about glassblowing was interesting, and relevant to the story in many ways, but also bogged down the pace for me, but that could also be due to Francis' tendency to go on, at length, about things and to use twelve words when four would do.

I found the end to be mildly unsatisfying, not because the mystery wasn't solved, but rather...everything felt forced. The drama of the final scene seemed over the top, and as everything was revealed in a "This Is What Happened" way, I almost wished I'd skipped to the end. I didn't mind the summary so much as I felt cheated the chance to have figured things out along with the narrator--which either means I wasn't paying attention as the story unfolded or it just wasn't compelling enough to hold my attention OR the author phoned it in with this story.

I don't regret reading this story--I certainly learned a lot about glassblowing--but it's going to be hard for me to pick up the next Francis story for me.

The book had a good mystery to it that kept me reading but seemed to drag on at parts. It was a classic story on how greed and half truths can lead to real detriment and consequences in people’s lives. Probably wouldn’t read again but I’m glad I did. 3/5.

Glassblowing was interesting but the actual crime felt contrived and I never really understood it.

Yet another not-particularly great Francis novel. 'Good enough', but I think I'll take the advice I was given when I was first recommended Francis; I'll read the books he wrote on his own, but leave out the ones he wrote with his son. The last few books haven't been all that great, so Under Orders, which I'm currently reading, will be my last Francis novel.

Reading the book felt a bit like reading one of the last of Agatha Christie's novels; you can tell who the bad guy (the fourth attacker, in this case - the other three are known early on) is 150 pages in advance, meaning there's no big plot twist at the end. Also, I usually disregard medical inaccuracies in novels written by mystery writers but I can't stop myself from noting that although a big injection of insulin might be a useful way to murder someone in some specific contexts, it definitely would be a stupid thing to do to try to employ it the way it was employed in the book. I am almost certain it would not have worked the way the author assumed it would have.

What I liked: The writing style, the glass blowing, the characters.

This is a re-read. I've only read it once before, and it stuck in my head because the protagonist, glass-blower Gerard Logan, lives in the village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds in England, and I have been there, often. I can visualize the very shop that I think Mr. Francis imagined as Gerard's glass studio and shop, the hotel across the street, and the main road generally.

I always learn something from a Dick Francis novel: about people, about writing, and about whatever occupation or hobby features in the story. I couldn't remember the specifics of the 'mystery' in this book, but I remembered all the stuff about glassblowing. I love Dick Francis's novels. I know I've said this before many times, but it's no less true for that.

What a complete load of nonsense. Worst book that I've read for many a year.