Without doubt the worst Dick Francis novel I've ever read with only very tenuous links to horse racing (which is the main reason I enjoy them) and a dry plot mainly about weather.

The story follows two meteorologists as they attempt to fly through the eye of a Caribbean hurricane. However, unbeknownst to one of them, the loan of the aircraft and equipment is subject to stipulations including that the plane has to land on a deserted island in order to carry out a suspicious activity. A range of problems with some pretty severe consequences follow which the main character has to sort out in order to find out just what is going on.

I found, without the horse racing background, the story didn't really go anywhere. The plot was tame and the characters were flat and unengaging. Not one of the author's best in my opinion.

It’s been a while since I read a book by Francis. This was not your typical Dick Francis book. Perry Stuart is a TV weather man. His passion for the weather takes him into the middle of hurricane Orin. Literally. It also throws him into the middle of a secretive plot within a group of traitors. This book peaked my interest and the pace moved along nicely. However, I felt a little bit disconnected from it. It was choppy in parts. The usual race horse theme did make an appearance but it seemed to be thrown in just to make an appearance however so slight. This was a decent Francis book but it wasn’t his best

After my November shoulder surgery, I re-read about 20 Dick Francis mystery novels. This was maybe my least favorite, but still made for a pleasant diversion during recovery. Some of the Francis novels I like much better and they are all good vacation (or recovery) reading, in my opinion. Francis is a former champion steeplechase jockey, turned sports columnist, turned mystery writer. Every book a bestseller, Francis uses the racing world as a context for his inductive heroes (mild-mannered, non-aggressive, but like tempered steel) to solve the mystery, deal with villains, and get justice (not always the same thing as legal resolution). My favorites are NERVE, BREAK IN, ENQUIRY, REFLEX, BOLT, BANKER, PROOF, and there are many more that I really like. To call them "horse stories" is absurd, but I must say Francis' books hit the spot in this reader that caused me to read every horse story I could find as a young girl :).

I like Dick Francis books, but I didn't like this one. Far-fetched and flat.

Not the usual Francis protagonist, a horse trainer, owner, jockey etc., but a meteorologist who wants to fly through a hurricane. And does, with disastrous, nearly fatal results, and a mystery to solve
Of course there are horses in the story because, after all, it’s Dick Francis.

I bought a Dick Francis book ages ago to read, though I cannot now remember which it was. It was good, and his work has been recommended to me again lately since I have been reading so many racehorse books. This was not the book I should have started with. I did not enjoy this at all, and had to force myself to finish it. I would not suggest this particular book, though I will hold judgment for the rest.

There was a racing connection, in that the main character was a weatherman that those in the racing community consulted. There were some other racing connections, but the focus was on meteorologists flying through hurricanes and shenanagins. I cannot imagine this book would be the finest piece of work from this author.

Perry Stuart is a meteorologist working for the BBC. A co-worker offers him the opportunity to fly through a Caribbean hurricane and Perry goes along. While Kris is a good pilot, he panics coming out of the hurricane eye and the plane crashes in the ocean. Perry finds himself washed up on an island. While he is waiting to be rescued, he finds some information on the island and understands just enough of it to put his life in great danger.
Typical Dick Francis: main character gets himself in a heap of trouble and spends the last two thirds of the book trying to stay alive. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't paying enough attention at the beginning to get the characters straight. I should have known they'd be important later on. But I enjoyed this enough to keep me reading and wondering who, in fact, was behind sales orders and would the bad guys be caught in the end.

Dick Francis is best known for his crime novels that are set in the world of British horse racing, and these books, I think, are his most successful, probably because this is the area that he knows best. He has, however, written a few other books that have little or nothing to do with horse racing and, for a variety of reasons, some of these books don't really measure up to the high standards of his others. Such is the case here, at least in my opinion.

The protagonist of this novel is Perry Stuart, a meteorologist for the BBC. As the book opens, Stuart has been floating alone for several long hours in the vast Caribbean Sea, supported only by a life jacket. He has become delusional and believes he is going to die. The reader understands, though, that Stuart cannot die because he to live to narrate the tale.

As we go back in time to begin the story, we learn that Stuart's best friend is another BBC meteorologist named Kris Ironside. Both men are thirty-one and Ironside is an amateur pilot. The two decide that they'd like nothing more than to go to the Caribbean and fly through the eye of a hurricane that is forming there. They meet up with some wealthy people in south Florida, one of whom offers to loan them a plane. So the setup is that these two, supposedly intelligent men (Stuart has a doctorate) are going to fly off into a major hurricane with an amateur pilot who has never flown into a hurricane before at the controls of a borrowed plane that the pilot has never flown before. What could possibly go wrong?

We know, of course, what's going to go wrong because we already know that Stuart has been left to die in the water. By opening the book as he does, though, Francis drains all of the tension out of what could have been a very compelling scene in which the two men fly into the hurricane. And, I'm sorry to say, there's precious little tension in this book to spare.

The setup of all this takes nearly a third of the book in which nothing much of consequence actually takes place. There's no apparent criminal activity, just a couple of guys plotting their flight plans. It eventually turns out that there's another aspect to this ill-fated flight that Ironside "accidentally" forgot to mention to Stuart, and so, after the first hundred pages or so, the plot such as it is, slowly begins to reveal itself.

It's a pretty convoluted story that makes little or no sense at all, at least to this reader. One significant problem with the story is that it lacks the malevolent, powerful, nasty villain that usually lurks at the heart of a Dick Francis novel. There's nobody very scary in this book at all.

The biggest problem with the book, though, lies in the fact that when he gets outside of his usual area of expertise, Francis apparently feels compelled to do hours upon hours of research into the subject he's writing about. There's certainly no problem with that, but as I've complained in a couple of earlier reviews, once having done all of this research Francis seems determined to get every last bit of it into the book, even if it's boring and even if it does nothing whatsoever to advance the plot.

In this case, we spend page after page after page learning about weather and about how tropical storms form. We also have to read a ton of material about radiation. If you're interested in that sort of thing, this book will be right up your alley, but if you're looking for a taut, fast-paced, scary, interesting thriller, this is not the book for you.

Were I not so ridiculously compulsive about this sort of thing, I would have abandoned this book after about fifty pages--something I never thought I would say about a Dick Francis novel. And given the average GR rating of this book, I'm clearly the exception to the rule. I'm not sure what other readers were seeing here that I missed, but sadly this one just didn't work for me at all. 2.5 stars rounded up, just because it's Dick Francis.

Okay, the connection to racing was limited but important. I'll encourage you to read it yourself. Second Wind is about a meteorologist (weather guesser) stumbles on a plot to trade in nuclear material and the plot just keeps on twisting from there. I liked the bit with Trox Island and the cattle.
Living in Typhoon country myself I know the destruct force storms can be.

My first Dick Francis read...He's a smart writer, not overly explaining everything multiple times, you have to hold on a bit. I enjoyed that the book takes place away from a race track, it holds your attention the whole way through, and I didn't see the ending coming. The British know how to write mysteries and I think he's probably always a solid bet.

A story about a weatherman caught up in a situation where people in the horse racing fraternity are selling plutonium to arm nuclear weapons. Slightly ridiculous and not a classic Dick Francis. Not one of his better books, but still worth a read if you are bored.

I never have read a book I didn't like by Dick Francis but this is the first one. He got to far away from the stories of horse racing.