Risk

Rating:
Summary: Accountant to the rescue
Review: Dick Francis brings in a different kind of hero, an accountant!

The story is very enjoyable. This novel differs from some of his others in that the hero actually has a sex life.

While, I would highly recommend this book, Francis does throw out a number of easy clues to figure out the true villian in the story.

Rating:
Summary: An auditor as a hero, accountants everywhere will cheer
Review: Dick Francis has a winning formula: he writes books about a young man of around 30, in a career most people might think is boring, but which turns out to be exciting. His hero is usually taken for granted and under-appreciated by his family, and under-employed, but in the course of the book proves he is far smarter, cleverer, and more observant than anyone supposed. Usually, there's a highly intelligent middle-aged career woman who recognizes his worth and helps him along. It's a formula, but the details that Francis provides makes it work every time.

In this case, our hero is an accountant, an auditor. Many people would start to snore at the thought that auditing could be an exciting job; as a former auditor myself, who has since traded it in for the relative calm of a desk job, I was pleased to see him show how varied and interesting the job can be. Auditors have to know a great deal about a variety of industries, do a lot of travelling, and have highly analytical minds used to investigating small details and discrepancies that most people would not notice. (There might be a bit of bias on my part, of course.) All this means that an auditor winds up making a good investigator of mysteries, as well.

Along with the details of Roland's regular job, and the details of horse-racing that are in every book, we also happen to find out a great deal about yacht-building. Such details are all through Francis's books; he seems to know about every possible job, and must collect details as much as most people collect lint. I always enjoy learning these details!

In this particular book, we have some ambiguous people who turn out not to be bad guys, the person captaining the yacht that Roland first is stored on when kidnapped. Then, the bad guy turns out to be a total surprise, someone we don't suspect at all till the end is revealed. Nonetheless, once the details are pointed out, one goes "Of course!"

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, slight change of formula here
Review: In many ways this is a quintessential Francis novel, with a fairly normal, likeable hero put into a situation where he is subjected to physical and mental challenges. The plot here is pretty good, although somewhat far fetched. However, this novel varies from the typical successful Francis formuala by having a sexual interlude between the hero and a female supporting character quite early on in the story. This is unusual, since Francis' characters are typcially fairly chaste, but this has the addes uniqueness of having the supporting female character be an older woman who wants to experience sex and chooses the hero, barely recovered from a dangerous brush with criminal types, as her man. This is diverting mostly because it seems to me that it is so different from the norm! I was quite taken aback by this!