Philip Nore is everything one would expect a Dick Francis Hero to be. A Jockey, loner, resilient, stoic, a reliable friend (sigh!) and add many more positive adjectives. There is a maternal grandmother, who had disowned him and now demands that he look for his half-sister. His immense patience with the despicable woman was unbelievable, but again expected from a typical of a DF Hero. He did have a clever comeback for her towards the end.

He is also a photographer, which leads to the Hero solving the mystery around a dead photographer. He methodically solves the puzzle and in the process we learn (a lot) about photography. As I have said in the review of his other books, I welcome this opportunity of learning so much from a fictional book.

The ending of 1 mystery was left unfinished. I would have liked it neatly wrapped up. But I would still rate this among his better books.
As always, the Audible narration by Tony Britton was excellent.

One of my favourites in the Dick Francis audio binge so far. I especially enjoyed the photographic “puzzles” Phillip must solve, the way he comes to terms with both his past and his post-jockey future, and the romance. The mystery was good! But that’s pretty much always true, and here I enjoyed the surrounding details a lot.

It is interesting that what may have look fairly progressive in 1981, sill rings of sexism and homophobia in 2021. The best plotted of Francis's mysteries on this reread, and the last for awhile.

A typical Dick Francis page turner, one of the best

I love Dick Francis books and this is one of the best. You get invested in his characters so quickly. The action and plot develop quickly and keep going until the end.

Philip Nore is struggling to decide what he is going to do as his career as a jockey winds down. His other passion is photography. He doesn’t realize what a great photographer he is until the death of George Millace a racing photographer.

Philip finds that George has apparently been blackmailing people with photos. However, to uncover the secrets Philip must determine the secrets and puzzles in development of the photos. There is a lot of technical detail on how he does this. He also falls in love and has a sweet romance. He of course solves the puzzles and then confronts the victims all bad in giving them a choice.

The plot follows how he is also asked by his cantankerous dying Grandmother to find the sister he never knew he had. He must also decide on whether to continue to throw races, retire, let people get clise to him emotionally and save the Jockey Club from an unscrupulous bad guy. As always in all Francis novels he is beaten severely without miraculously any severe injuries.

I liked the story and as always Francis captures the hidden world of racing behind the scenes.

Philip Nore is a jockey,who also has an interest in photography.He is summoned by his dying grandmother,who had always treated his late mother harshly.

His grandmother drops a bombshell,Philip has a sister.He,on the other hand has been unaware of this,all his life.Now,he has to find that sister.

George Millace is the father of Philip's friend,Steve.He is an ace photographer but not a particularly scrupluous one.Blackmail,through his photographs is his side business.

After he dies suddenly,his house is burgled and Philip finds himself in danger from the people the dead man was blackmailing.

The book has familiar Francis ingredients,but I'm very fond of it as it was the very first Francis I ever read.It was an Urdu translation in a magazine and I wouldn't have discovered one of my favourite writers,had it not been for that translation.

So in 1984 before my 17th birthday, I first read this book, Reflex, by Dick Francis. It was amazing. It was my first mystery, and since then I have read all 40 or 50 by Frances and some of his son Felix Francis books many times over. Not all of them, but most of them I've read multiple times. The Felix Francis books I've only read a few of. Dick Francis is an amazing writer, and Reflex is one of his very best. Philip Nore is basically orphaned. His mother was a drug addict who left him with various people to take care of him when she was on a bender, and his grandmother simply hates him for a reason we learn later in the story. She is dying, and she implores him to find her missing granddaughter, his sister he didn't know he had. He is a jockey, and prefers to stay in his own private world, but over time he agrees to help his grandmother. One of the people who raised him taught him photography, and so in his spare time he moonlights at taking pictures, but doesn't realize how very talented he is. Over the course of the story, he meets certain people and reunites with others, comes to realize he has a new future with more companions and a different career. This review was not intended to be eloquent, just explanatory. If you like Dick Francis, if you like protagonists who are typically capable loners who don't fuss much, if you like mystery, and if you like well written books, I highly recommend Reflex as one of the best Dick Francis books ever written.

One of the better books from the later part of this author's long career, this one is heavily researched but reads very smoothly indeed. The love story is secondary in nature, but it has the author's typically eccentric touches and somehow seems more real because of them. The scene where the mc locates his childhood home and a woman who helped raise him is unforgettable. The last page is the apotheosis of the Dick Francis laconic anticlimax. I will add that, as usual for this author, the secondary characters are brilliantly drawn and fairly leap off the page.

Very good thriller; one needn't have any interest in horse racing to enjoy it.

Main character Philip Nore is a steeplechase jockey nearing the end of his career. He does have a possible new career as a photographer but lacks the confidence to give up his present for a potential future. He is a very intriguing character who is the product of a very unusual childhood. Philip's seventeen-year-old mother would frequently leave him with friends for various lengths of time. His few times with his mother were spent in a drug culture. He was exposed to marijuana and LSD as a preschooler. He saw his mother infrequently and never after the age of fifteen. He received birthday and Christmas gifts until his eighteenth birthday when he assumed she died - probably of a heroin overdose.

Two of the homes where he was left have influenced his present. He spent a couple of years with a gay couple named Charlie and Duncan who developed his interest in photography. He was with them for a couple of years until Duncan left and his mother swept him away to friends at a racing stable who developed his interest in being a jockey.

Now 30, he's more or less drifting in his life. Then a few things happen that change him. The trainer and owner he works for most often have asked him to throw a race. He had done this for them in the past but not for the last three years. And famous racing photographer George Millace died in a single car accident. Millage was an excellent photographer but not much liked because he had an unerring eye for photos that most didn't want to see. He was filled with ill will. His son Steve is a fellow jockey with Philip.

When Steve has a fall and breaks his collarbone, Philip offers him a ride home. Steve's mother's house had been burgled while they were at the funeral and again a couple of days later. The second time Mrs. Millace was beaten up by the burglars who were looking for a safe. Steve gives Philip a box of his father's mistakes that he had carefully kept and Philip was intrigued to find out why he had saved them. His common interest in photography and love of puzzles drew him in - and led him into danger.

Another change is also coming to Philip's life. The grandmother who threw her daughter out when she was a teen wants to see him. She's sent a lawyer from the firm who does her business to bring him to her. The lawyer guilts Philip into visiting the grandmother he hates for her treatment of his mother. She drops a bombshell and wants him to find his sister Amanda - a sister he didn't know he had.

Philip works with the lawyer to look for his sister while trying to solve George Millace's puzzles. The puzzles lead to Millace's possible side job as a blackmailer and put Philip in great danger from those Millace had blackmailed when they learn that he has the photographic files.

This was an excellent story with an intriguing main character and very interesting photographic puzzles. I really liked the descriptions of the characters which illuminated them in a few short sentences. I liked Philip learning more about his family and his past. I also liked that it led him to a new future and a woman to love.

To my shame, I admit that I have heard of Dick Francis only recently. For such an acclaimed author, he is sadly untranslated in the world. However, having finally heard of him and his great writing opus, I became intrigued. Even though the world of horses, races and jockeys has never actually appealed to me, the glowing reviews of his novels induced me to give his work a try. Needless to say, I was impressed, and felt it was my duty to write a review and atone for having neglected Mr. Francis' work for so long.

I'm keeping this deliberately short, in order not to spoil the reading pleasure of fellow/soon-to-be Francis fans :)

"Reflex" is a great read. The plot is well thought of and well executed. It has a rather slow start, and it builds up slowly, but as it crescendos towards the end, the novel just keeps you glued to the pages. (Case in point - it was so suspenseful that I read the last chapter during my lecture.) To some it may not seem so, but I have found the slow start to be a good point - as a layman concerning all things horses and racing, I needed to ease into that world. And the slow start had an excellent effect on character development. We get to know our protagonist Phillip Nore, a jockey with a penchant for photography, who later on deals with a wide array of problems - from family issues and concerns about his profession, to shady business in the form of cleverly disguised photographic puzzles, the "inheritance" left behind by late George Millace, a noted photographer and an acquaintance of Phillip's. Phillip tackles all those issues reluctantly at first, but as the novel proceeds, he shows a formidable level of dogged determination one would never expect from a man who, by his own admission, always took things as they came and never made any firm or life-shattering decisions.

Overall, I really liked this book. It contains no foul language or graphic scenes of violence, and it's excellent for anyone searching for a nice, clean mystery read.

Another twisty pleasurable whodunnit from Dick Francis! I quickly became drawn into the world of Philip Nore, captivated by the twists and turns, trying to solve the mystery as events unfolded. Love a book like this one that leaves reality behind even for a little while!

Can't wait to dig into the next one and see what's in store for the next 'chaser on the downs.

I've said it before and here I am saying it again: nobody writes candy mysteries like Francis. His protagonists are likable, the villains appropriately dislikable, and you always learn something. The formula is simple and consistently adhered to, but the books are not the worse for it. This is a fine example of the form.

The formula is pretty simple. The genial and easygoing 30ish hero stumbles onto dark conspiracies in the racing world. He's beaten up, but bravely faces down the villains. He narrowly escapes, bringing down their plot and winning a girl at the same time. The occupation and conspiracy vary from novel to novel, but always there's a new bit of insider knowledge that helps lend the novel a ring of authenticity: the chemistry of photography, magnetic tapes from computers, the complexities of flying by instruments.

I've read them all at least three times and, while the names don't stick in my head, I get a flash of the protagonist, the villain, the occupation, and maybe the set-piece battle by the end of the first page. "Oh right, the photographer! There's coloured smudges and bizarre developing chemicals, and blackmail."

This time, though, I set out to study the craft of the book. What words does Francis use to paint a scene? Why those words? What patterns can I detect? My notes comprise the rest of this "review". I doubt they'll surprise anyone who's studied literature or been a fiction writer, but it's all been eye-opening to me.

I began paying attention to sentence length. It varies, as it should--lots of sentences the same length and structure are dull. He's fond of stitching short observations together into a longer sentence. Here's the opening paragraph:

Winded and coughing, I lay on one elbow and spat out a mouthful of grass and mud. The horse I'd been riding raised its weight off my ankle, scrambled untidily to its feet and departed at an unfeeling gallop. I waited for things to settle: chest heaving, bones still rattling from the bang, sense of balance recovering from a thirty-mile-an-hour somersault and a few tumbling rolls. No harm done. Nothing broken. Just another fall.

Lots of small observations, but only a few short sentences. Generally he finds ways to string the short observations into longer sentences:

He soared around the whole thing with bursting joie-de-vivre, even to the extent of passing the favorite on the run-in, and we came back to bear hugs from the blue hair (for the benefit of television) and an offer to me of a spare ride in the fifth race, from a worried-looking small-time trainer.

The "and ... and ... and" throughout the book generates the sense of a relaxed and informal description of the story, even as the word-choice and grammar indicate careful and mature writing.

I noticed the characteristic Francis descriptions of the hero's reactions to provocation: "flatly", "mildly", "calmly".

You construct a sentence with a colourful words, which tell the story, and essential filler words. The story is told by the adjectives, nouns, and verbs that leap out of the page at you: "soared ... bursting joie-de-vivre ... passing ... favourite ... bear hugs ... blue hair ... worried ... small-time trainer". The rest of it is there because it has to be formal English, to fully specify meaning, to permit variations in sentence structure and length. But the story is brought to life by the selection of those colour words.