As much as I love Dick Francis, I *hate* American publishers who Americanize vocabulary, changing things like "sideburns" to "whiskers" and "traffic warden" to "parking warden". It's a book by an English author, set in England. Don't jolt me out of the story by introducing words Brits never use ("singlet"?); it ruins a perfectly good story.

This was a solid book, especially considering that it was one of his later books. It is always interesting to me when he wrote books that did not focus on horse racing (albeit they always have horse racing somewhat involved). In general it is best to write about things that you know about in order to be believable. This one has the hero being a glass blower. Not knowing all that much about that field, it seemed to me that Francis really did his research on it as his details seemed very believable to me.

A fun thing that I like to do when reading Dick Francis books is anticipate where the title comes from. In this book it comes from (spoiler) when I had earlier predicted something else to be shattered. That was a pleasant surprise for me. A prediction of mine did prove true though. It was clear to me the identity of Black Mask Four (or whatever name Gerard assigned him). Then in the end I had doubts about it, but was proved correct. Whether this was a result of my "outstanding deductive reasoning", a coincidence, or if it was obvious to careful readers I do not know.

Dick Francis books are always fun quick reads.

An entertaining novel. I learnt more about glass blowing and what happens to molten glass if it is not cooled down properly! Martin Stukley a jockey dies in a fall from a horse on New Years Eve race day. His good friend Gerald is embroiled in a mysterious videotape from Martin. Enter Rosie and her gang of thugs who want the videotape. But what is on it? Cure for cancer, how to make a million dollar glass necklace or something else. Someone wants it. Gerald is beaten up, robbed and meets the love of his life a policewoman.

I enjoyed the farfetched story where Gerald gets beaten up and even though he has a policewoman girlfriend does not report his beatings and nor does she. This beggars belief but suspending that giant flaw in the plot it is still an entertaining story. The battle scene in his glass blowing studio is a gruesome affair when Rosie goes off the rails.

6/15/2021

Far from Francis's best work. The missing videotape MacGuffin is so silly, especially the ridiculous solution, that the whole plot becomes almost pointless. The villains are cartoonishly evil, with no attempt to make them seem real. One of the subsidiary villains has exactly the same function and motive as a character in the last book by Francis that I read, Dead Heat. A death in the final section of the book seems to be a (failed) device to make part of the book emotionally moving.

The material about glass-blowing is fascinating, however, and this makes up a large part of the book. So, not a disaster, but certainly a disappointment.