About both the world of merchant banking and that of horse racing, Dick Francis (with his wife Mary) creates a plot of awful dimensions that result in two murders, one completely out of the blue and unnecessary, which really knock you sideways. You grow to love the horses and Tim Ekaterin, an unusual hero to say the least, who is effective and low-key and manages to think out of the box at the same time as he reacts immediately to physical dangers. Great character!

I started reading this in an airplane and then left it there, so I had to rent it from the library to finish it, but I finally did! I have never read a Dick Francis book before but I knew he was all about horseracing mysteries. I was interested in this from the start and it kept being a fun read all the way through. The progression of events felt well-paced with enough time to get to know all the important characters. The mystery itself felt unique, and I liked that Tim started having the same suspicions that I did when the clues came up. Based on this, I would definitely read another Dick Francis when I'm in a mystery mood.

In Banker, Dick Francis is able to take two things I know very little about — merchant banking and thoroughbred breeding — and twist them together in such a way that I can’t put the book down. I always find reading Francis to be effortless. He pulls me in from the start with an unusual situation. Young banker Tim Ekaterin finds his boss standing in the fountain in front of the bank with his clothes on. This situation is what leads to Tim being responsible for deciding whether or not the finance the purchase of Sandcastle, a star racehorse. He becomes quite close to Sandcastle’s owner and his young daughter after birth defects begin to appear in the horse’s progeny — they all have too much to lose. Francis tends to set his main characters up in almost-but-not-quite inappropriate relationships with young (17, in this case) girls, which is a little weird, but things never cross the line. Regardless, I know when I pick up a Dick Francis book that I’m going to be sucked in until the last page.

I have read several Dick Francis novels and this one stands out as one of my favorites. Told from the perspective of Tim Ekaterin, a merchant banker who risks his reputation, and the bank's money, on a racehorse turned stud. The complexities of this side of horse breeding were new to me, and I found Francis' telling of it both entertaining and informative. The mystery revolves around why an apparently healthy and robust stud produces statistically numerous deformed offspring. While this may sound dry or academic, you find yourself invested in the characters' lives and fates which hang by the proverbial thread on the reason behind the unfortunate births.

I was hampered in this book by not knowing much about banking and horse breeding. Therefore, my enjoyment was not as great. Of course, I enjoyed the main character, Tim Ekaterin, who was an investment banker at the bank with the same name. He was an ethical man who did his best for his bank. When the bank loaned a large sum of money to Oliver Knowles to buy a champion horse, Sandcastle, for breeding purposes, Tim took over the guidance of Knowles. Of course, neither knew that a calamity would fall on Sandcastle's prodigy. It took Tim to gradually figure out what was causing the problem, and he did so at great cost too him. The ending was great!

Banker by Dick Francis is a 1982 publication.

A nice change of pace!

Tim Ekaterin is an up- and- coming merchant banker who goes out on a limb to front a huge amount of money to Oliver Knowles, a stud-farmer, to buy a champion horse named Sandcastle.

Tim becomes friends with Oliver and his daughter while learning a great deal about horse breeding, in the process. Tim makes other acquaintances in the horse world, including an ‘animal healer’, a man with a reputation for bringing animals back from the brink of death.

Things are looking good for Tim, career wise, and his office politics are improving along with his success. His personal life could be better, though, as he pines for the wife of one of his colleagues.

Unfortunately, things begin to go awry when a veterinarian is murdered amid Sandcastle’s foals being born with deformities or dying. The race is on to discover who is behind the murder, and to figure out what is going on with Sandcastle’s progeny. The horse is insured to the hilt for everything imaginable- but this- which means Oliver will most likely lose everything…

This book is so different from the ones I’ve been reading recently, I suppose that could be part of why I found it so appealing. The horse world has always harbored a dark underbelly and Francis made a career writing about it. This book is a bit different from other Francis novels, I think, as a merchant banker is the main character, a man who only had a moderate amount of knowledge about the industry, only becoming involved because of the bank’s business dealings. Francis, a former jockey, displays his personal insider view in these books. This novel offers quite an education about the breeding process.

I found Tim likeable and although some of the plot points were a bit far-fetched, I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery and am wondering why all my Dick Francis books have been languishing on my shelf collecting dust for so many years.

Because I’m culling through my paperbacks, making a few tough choices about what to keep and what to donate to the library, I was seriously considering letting the Dick Francis collection go. Now, I think I’ll hold onto these books for a little while longer!

4 stars

Excellent Story

So well written, and lots of intrigue. Dick Frances truly knows how to tell a story. This may have been the best of his that I have read. So good!

A Rousing Success! A Fast Paced Read That Will Leave You Breathless!

In a buzz that rose to a roar the runners covered their mile-and-a-half journey; longer than the 2,000 Guineas, the same length as the Derby. Sandcastle, in scarlet and white, was making no show at all to universal groans and lay only fifth as the field swept around the last bend, and Dissdale looked as if he might have a heart attack.
Alas for my shirt, I thought. Alas for Lorna's forecasts. Bang goes the banker that can't lose.
Dissdale, unable to watch, collapsed weakly onto one of the small chairs that dotted the balcony, and in the next door boxes people were standing on top of theirs jumping up and down screaming.
"Sandcastle making his move... " the commentator's voice warbled over the loudspeakers, but the yells of the croud drowned out the rest.
The scarlet and white colors moved to the outside. The daisy-cutter action was there for the world to see. The superb horse, the big rangy colt full of courage and eating up the ground. Our box in the grandstand was almost a furlong down the coast from the winning post, and when he reached us Sandcastle still had three horses ahead. He was flying, though, like a streak, and I found the sight of this fluid valour, this all out striving, immensely moving and exciting. I grabbed Dissdale by his disparing shoulder and hauled him to his feet.
"Look," I shouted in his ear. "Watch, your banker's going to win. He's a marvel. He's a dream."
He turned with a gaping mouth to stare in the direction of the winning post and he saw... he saw Sandcastle among the tumult going like a javelin, free now of all the others, aiming straight for the prize.
"He's won, Dissdale's mouth said slackley, though amid the noise I could hardly hear him. "He's bloody won."

*******
Banker by Dick Francis, a former champion steeplechase jockey who rode for the Queen Mother. After he retired from racing, he began writing mystery novels set in and around the horse racing industry.
Dick Francis is my all-time favorite authors and this is one of my favorite stories.
His first-hand knowledge of the horse racing world allows him to give his readers a unique view point into the inner workings and intricate details that take place throughout thoroughbred racing. The detail adds authenticity and depth to the storylines and brings out the life and emotions to the characters. This book left it's mark on my heart long after I closed the back cover!

Tim Ekaterin is a young, rising, merchant banker. His days are spent deciding which business ventures to lend money to. Doesn't that sound dull? After careful consideration and research, he crafts a very large loan enabling a stud farmer to purchase a champion race horse for breeding. As the introduction begins, "It's difficult to say where disaster begins..." and all great novels deal in disasters. Tim finds himself working desperately to save the bank's money and learns a great deal more about horses, procreation, and genetic-altering drugs than he ever imagined. Sandcastle, the champion, fathers foals of hideous deformity. There is nothing in his background to account for it.

Meanwhile, a serial rapist and murderer is killing young women in the neighborhood of the stud farm. The owner's young daughter is found murdered right by their fence late one night. Except, she hasn't been raped and she has a small bottle of dog shampoo hidden in her clothing.

Dick Francis paced this novel beautifully. As each new drama unfolds, we watch Tim struggle to understand. We see him mature from a man who understands money to a man who understands more about human emotions, about the desire for fame, about greed, and the seemingly infinite capacity humans have to make mistakes. The supporting cast are all artfully drawn, and the subplots are engrossing. It's the ending that lost this book a 5th star. The main story finishes, but the secondary story of Tim's love life comes to an abrupt end. It needed at least one more sentence to complete the book, but we are left to imagine our own ending and wonder what the author was thinking.

Banker is another fine entry in the Francis series. This one is a bit longer than many other Francis books -- 10 hours in audio format, rather than the average 7 or 8 -- and the first half of the book (a full 5 hours in audio) has very little mystery in it at all. Banker takes its own sweet time building the background and wandering through the life of the main character. In fact, this slow buildup should tell the reader that the mystery may not actually be the most important part of the book at all. It seems to me that Banker is more about things like ambition, growth, potential, and loss -- and how different people deal with them -- than about identifying or thwarting the culprit.

I've always been a big fan of the way Francis writes about his characters' internal lives in that spare, understated, yet still intense style of his -- and there's a lot of that in this book. If you can just sit back and enjoy the slow buildup during the first half of the book, I think you'll find a worthwhile payoff by the end.

Love it. All the very British repressed emotion!

I liked that the protagonist was not a jockey as his usually are. It was a nice change and I learned a lot about merchant banking, as well as more about horses and their welfare. I also rather liked that the author allowed one of his likeable characters to be killed off and that the narrator's love was rather illicit.