Henry Grey didn’t particularly care for having been born the heir to an earldom. He was a reserved, practical young man who liked working with his hands and who sought only the right to live as he wished: but the nearest he had got to this was to ride as an amateur steeplechase jockey and to avoid successfully the match-making plans of his mother.

On impulse one day he threw up his disliked respectable desk job and joined a firm which arranged the transport of racehorses by air to all parts of the world.

Yardman Transport was his passport to many things — not least a girl to love — and on his journeys he discovered a tidy little racket which eventually brought him face to face with death. Among other troubles there was Billy, a nineteen-year-old hoodlum whose views on what to do with the aristocracy made the French Revolution look like a Sunday School treat. But Henry, as he pointed out to Billy, could be as tough as necessary: and it was necessary...

Like his four previous thrillers, the new Dick Francis will excite and entertain readers throughout the world and in many languages.

Steven Scott owned nine racehorses and delighted in them, and he had friend, Jody Leeds, who trained them. Gradually, unwillingly, Steven discovered that Jody had been systematically cheating him of large sums of money.

Not unnaturally he removed his horses from Jody’s care, but this simple act unleashed unforeseeable consequences Steven’s peaceful existence erupted overnight into a fierce and accelerating struggle to retain at first his own good name but finally life itself.

This book takes a look at several all too-possible fiddles and frauds, some of them funny, some vicious, but all of them expensive for the fall guy.

Steeplechase jockeys, like all other professional sportsmen, have to find a second career for themselves as the years go by. Jonah Dereham, retiring from the saddle at thirty-two, chose to become a bloodstock agent and spent his life travelling round racehorse sales, finding and bidding for the sort of horse each of his clients wanted. Jonah wanted only to mind his own business, but several disturbing incidents forced him to realise that someone was out to ruin him, and to survive he had to find the answers. A couple of bully boys began to put the boot in, and Jonah found himself progressively forced to fight for the survival of his horses, his business and himself. Hindered by a brother who hit the bottle, helped by a blonde in an orange MGB, he pressed onward to a rough conclusion.

Set in the world of bloodstock auction sales, Knock Down takes a sharp but tolerant look at what the racehorse dealing industry gets up to behind the scenes.

Dick Francis’s second thriller again has steeplechasing as its setting. Despair, suicide and obsessive hatred — mixed well with humour, love, and horses — brew up into a story of a battle between one man’s nerve and another man’s cunning. Robert Finn, steeplechase jockey, finds himself the focus of a malicious campaign which is also afflicting his friends, and sets out to uncover its source, and remove it.

Matt Shore, flying for a small air-taxi charter firm, took five passengers on a routine flight to the races — two jockeys, a trainer, an owner, and a friend. At the end of the afternoon he flew them off homewards again, discussing the successes and disasters of their day.

Awaiting them in the summer sky lay a quick extinction, which was avoided by a coincidence, an instinct, a hair’s breadth...

Matt guessed the sudden death had been aimed at one of his passengers: he didn’t know which and he didn’t know why, and he didn’t particularly want to know, he had troubles enough of his own. But gradually, remorselessly, he found himself being sucked in, until in the end the information was forced upon him, and action became necessary for survival.

Dick Francis, with a string of bestsellers (most recently enquiry) to his name, needs no introduction, rat race is a taut, exciting, beautifully planned thriller which will add to his reputation.

Philip Nore, steeplechase jockey, asked no more from life than horses to ride and time to himself to spend on his other great interest, photography.

Like a minefield of dragons’ teeth, whole crops of problems suddenly erupted in his path, disturbing and threatening and ultimately dangerous.

Aided only by a natural wit and a knowledge of cameras, he unwillingly began picking his way through, facing on the way not only ferocious enemies but the traps and uncertainties of his own past.

David Cleveland, investigator for the Jockey Club, goes to Norway in response to an appeal from Oslo racecourse.

A British jockey, riding in Norway, has disappeared, and with him has gone a day’s takings from the turnstiles. The Norwegian police have found no trace of him, nor have the British, and the case is being filed as just one more unsolved theft.

David Cleveland is a last resort. He goes without much expectation — and finds himself in waters as dark and deep as the fjords.

Dick Francis’s new novel has all the excitement and mastery of his genre which has made him a worldwide bestseller.

As a child Edward Lincoln had had the run of a racing stable, and as a young man he had earned his living riding horses in films. So when a sick friend asked him to investigate the comprehensive failure of a string of racehorses, he knew more or less what to look for.

But there were difficulties.

For one thing, the horses in question were in South Africa.

For another, it was impossible for him to go about the task quietly and unnoticed. He was by that time a world-class star of action films, in which he played the hero. Everywhere he went he was watched and (when he would allow it) interviewed. Away from his own home, the limelight was permanently switched on.

Also, although he knew himself to be a quiet ordinary man with a wife and family, everyone he met persisted in believing him to be a superman, like his image.

The easy-seeming survey of the string of racehorses blew him through a smokescreen into circumstances where to survive he had to make himself become the man everyone else already thought he was.