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.

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.

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.