Выясняя обстоятельства загадочного самоубийства своего приятеля, жокей Роберт Финн сталкивается с весьма странной полосой роковых случайностей и совпадений, ломающих карьеры его перспективным коллегам. Финн решает провести частное расследование, чтобы установить, к кому сходятся нити незримого заговора.

Выясняя обстоятельства загадочного самоубийства своего приятеля, жокей Роберт Финн сталкивается с весьма странной полосой роковых случайностей и совпадений, ломающих карьеры его перспективным коллегам. Финн решает провести частное расследование, чтобы установить, к кому сходятся нити незримого заговора.

Если хочешь, чтобы тебя боялись, найди самого неуступчивого и раздави его — безотказно действующее правило. Именно так намерена поступить шайка лошадиных барышников, обнаружившая, что их замыслам угрожает чрезмерная щепетильность их коллеги. Но Джонас Дерхем только кажется мягким и уступчивым. Под внешней интеллигентностью таится стальная решимость. И вскоре мошенники пожалели о том, что вообще связались с ним. Потому что Джонас Дерхем придерживался собственного правила, что, когда тебя бьют, надо непременно давать сдачи.

Если хочешь, чтобы тебя боялись, найди самого неуступчивого и раздави его – безотказно действующее правило. Именно так намерена поступить шайка лошадиных барышников, обнаружившая, что их замыслам угрожает чрезмерная щепетильность их коллеги. Но Джонас Дерхем только кажется мягким и уступчивым. Под внешней интеллигентностью таится стальная решимость. И вскоре мошенники пожалели о том, что вообще связались с ним. Потому что Джонас Дерхем придерживался собственного правила – когда тебя бьют, надо непременно давать сдачи.

Если хочешь, чтобы тебя боялись, найди самого неуступчивого и раздави его – безотказно действующее правило. Именно так намерена поступить шайка лошадиных барышников, обнаружившая, что их замыслам угрожает чрезмерная щепетильность их коллеги. Но Джонас Дерхем только кажется мягким и уступчивым. Под внешней интеллигентностью таится стальная решимость. И вскоре мошенники пожалели о том, что вообще связались с ним. Потому что Джонас Дерхем придерживался собственного правила – когда тебя бьют, надо непременно давать сдачи.

Сид Холли, получив тяжелую травму, вынужден сменить карьеру жокея на работу частного детектива. По поручению Жокейского Клуба он начинает расследование загадочных проигрышей и смертей лошадей-фаворитов из конюшни Джорджа Каспара, тренера с безупречной репутацией. С первых шагов Сид ощущает противодействие и давление. Слишком значительные фигуры замешаны в скандал, слишком большие деньги брошены под копыта скаковых лошадей. Холли оказывается перед выбором: продолжать следствие и рисковать жизнью или отказаться от него, но навсегда потерять уважение к себе.

Во второй книге тетралогии о Сиде Холли главный герой расследует три дела одновременно и познает цену самоуважения.

Тони Бич, владелец винной лавки, прекрасный знаток лошадей, дорожит своим покоем и благополучием. Но внезапно в его тихую размеренную жизнь врываются преступления и смерть. Волею жестоких обстоятельств Тони оказывается главной пружиной в опасной игре, где жизнь человека ничто по сравнению с баснословными прибылями подпольного бизнеса.

В настоящее издание вошли остросюжетные произведения известных зарубежных мастеров детективно-приключенческого жанра - Д. Френсиса, Р. С. Пратера и П. Квентина.Содержание:Дик Фрэнсис. Дьявольский коктейль (переводчики: Михайлов Г., Вишневой А.)Ричард Скотт Пратер. Не убежишь! (переводчик: Александра Борисенко)Патрик Квентин. Мой сын убийца? (переводчик:  Михайлов Г.)

Young investment banker Tim Ekaterin suddenly finds himself involved in the cutthroat world of thoroughbred racing — and discovers his unexceptional world of business blown to smithereens.

When the multimillion-dollar loan he arranges to finance the purchase of Sandcastle, a champion, is threatened by an apparent defect in the horse, Tim searches desperately for an answer. And he falls headlong into violence and murder. Even so, he cannot stop. He must find the key to the murders. And to Sandcastle.

Gene Hawkins, investigator (of a special sort) by trade, was expert at arranging events so that they appeared accidental to all involved. Therefore when he himself became a witness to an “accident” his curiosity flared up bright, and he insisted on looking into what he regarded as a work of art.

Since his boss had already been trying to jolt him out of a spell of severe depression he got every encouragement — along with the time-bomb help of his boss’s seventeen-year-old daughter Lynnie.

A quarter of a million pounds worth of Derby-winning stallion had vanished into the Blue Grass of Kentucky... and a young man and a girl spent a dangerous afternoon in a punt on the River Thames. From these far-apart but related beginnings Gene Hawkins found himself trailing lost blood-horses over half America, until he in turn became the prey, and the sport changed sides with a vengeance.

When Kit Fielding, champion steeplechase jockey, finds that Princess Casilia, his chief patron, is facing serious trouble, he goes unhesitatingly to her aid. Neither realises that his instinctive support is the first step to a frightening battle involving violent risk, with the honour of the princess’s family as the prize and Kit’s own destruction as the forfeit.

Beset by other problems, not least his troubled romance with Danielle, the princess’s niece, Kit knows that while steering through deadly outside dangers and riding at breakneck speed in races, he must also contend with the long-term hatred of his own family’s enemy.

Many of the characters from Break In, Dick Francis’s previous bestseller, reappear in Bolt, but the story ends here — and it’s a story which will keep every reader on the very edge of his seat until the last page is turned.

Blood ties can mean trouble, chains and fatal obligation. Champion steeplechase jockey Kit Fielding, snared by bonds reaching back into history, discovers this to be only too true when he finds he cannot escape from an intensely dangerous situation.

Direct, forceful and inventive, he goes to the defence of his twin sister whose husband faces ruin when a spiteful newspaper campaign sets out to wreck his career as a racehorse trainer. Kit’s courage succeeds beyond the point of drawing the fire upon himself so that he in turn becomes a target.

Break In is about family relationships, about love, hatred and obsession; it is about the use and abuse of power by the gutter press, who will go to any lengths to get the information they seek and then use that information in any way they choose; and throughout it is about the day-to-day life of a top-flight horseman, for whom race-riding is the most demanding, the most rewarding love of all.

Break In is vintage Francis, with pulsating descriptions of the races themselves at which he himself was champion A first-class thriller written by the acknowledged master of his field.

Sid Halley, the ex-champion jockey turned investigator who appears in Odds Against and Whip Hand, is back. In Come to Grief he faces new dilemmas, new dangers, new deeply demanding decisions.

Troubled, courageous and unwilling to admit defeat, for Sid Halley it is business as usual.

Peter Darwin, a young First Secretary in the Foreign Office, returns to England from Tokyo for some quiet leave before taking up a new post. On the way he stops briefly in Miami, and there becomes entangled in a fracas which involves his going back not just to England but to Gloucestershire, scene of the long-buried memories of his childhood.

Walking unexpectedly into a veterinary surgeon’s desperate troubles there, he begins to recall events from the past and comes to realise that if he stays around he can perhaps save a good many people from destruction.

Trained to penetrate the truths behind façades, he has to use all his diplomatic skills to unravel not political shenanigans but the cruel fates which befall racehorses. The trick, as he progressively discovers, is not to suffer the same deaths.

Comeback, which is Dick Francis’s thirtieth novel, is as exhilarating, as gripping and as brilliant as any of his previous bestsellers.

Free choice? There’s no such thing, according to Lee Morris, architect, engineer, jobbing builder and entrepreneur. Choice is pre-ordained by your personality, he says.

Stratton Park racecourse, privately owned, faces ruin in the hands of a squabbling family. Lee, loosely connected but not related, is slowly sucked into the turmoil, unwillingly on the surface but half-understanding the deep compulsions that influence his decisions. One road leads to safety, another to death. How do you know when you must choose? How do you know which is which? Lee’s choices and their consequences bring deadly results, but the road out of the quicksand is there, if he can find it.

Horses and racing, familiar Dick Francis ingredients, but this time there are also children, houses, roots and decisions. Danger? Naturally. Stratton Park racecourse is worth multi-millions, and all the splinter-groups of the Stratton family are playing to win.

Decider is an inspired concoction of wonderfully conceived characters and a totally unpredictable plot that can only mean one thing — you are in the hands of the master.

At thirty-five, Freddie Croft has retired as a steeplechase jockey and now runs a fleet of motor horseboxes transporting runners from their stables to the races, or brood mares to the stud farms. One of the hard and fast rules for all his drivers is never to pick up a hitchhiker, but of course one day they do, and by the time they reach base the passenger is dead.

This unwelcome corpse on his doorstep sweeps Freddie into a complicated conspiracy where little is as it seems, and where, like it or not, he has to fight to save not just his business but his very life.

Organised, intelligent and determined he may be, but punching at shifting shadows, trying to outwit adversaries whose existence he only suspects, not knowing what to believe or whom to trust, these intangibles take him into dangers very different from the old familiar perils of jump racing, and force him to search for unexpected answers.

Like each of his bestselling thrillers, Driving Force will excite and entertain readers throughout the world and in countless languages. As The Times said of him: ‘He is a writer of champion class.’

A bomb scare at Aintree halted the Grand National in 1997 and the racecourse was evacuated; twenty-two years earlier, Dick Francis had written a short story describing such an event at another course. Now, for the first time, Dick Francis has compiled a volume of short stories, the settings ranging from the National Hunt Festival at Cheltenham, where a middle-aged owner falls hopelessly in love with her jockey, to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, where the demon drink and wilting willpower take their toll. There are diverse as bookmakers and news editors, from crooked lawyers and contract killers.

With his remarkable blend of unrelenting suspense, finely tuned narrative and lean, stylish prose, Dick Francis’s thrillers have led readers to the winner’s enclosure year after year. From his very first novel to his most recent, the award-winning Master of Crime has treated his fans to a world of equine thrills and human frailty in a string of bestsellers of unparalleled excellence.

Dick Francis’s fans have a great treat in store — thirteen marvellous plots, thirteen sets of characters to admire, and thirteen stings in the tail to gasp over. Dick Francis is as much master of the short story as he is of the novel.