And I am caught up - if I can get all this posted before some glitch comes down the line. Classes started today - so I almost achieved my goal of getting this caught up before school started. Now if I can just stay on top of it. I'm not taking classes - but I have signed on for three evenings a week of rehearsals - some people never learn.
This one is set largely in the United States and I remembered parts of it quite clearly. European super stallions are being sold to US breeders but are hijacked on the road before they arrive at the new owner's stables or disappear into the mountains along with all the other horses from a mysteriously broken corral. The other horses are recovered but not the expensive stallion.
The first mystery is why they are being stolen, since their value at stud is minimal without their names. Another is why was one of the members of the syndicate owning the most recent missing horse targeted for murder.
Through a friend, "civil servant" Gene Hawkins is asked to go to the States and see if he can find the horse.
He decodes the crimes and survives with rather less than the usual malicious physical abuse that Francis dishes out to his heroes, but he hardly needs it because he is sunk to the point of suicide in clinical depression. Hawkins is the most depressed in a series of depressed heroes. He sleeps with his gun under his pillow in case he decides to finish himself off in the middle of the night. Henry Grey in Flying Finish wasn't exactly depressed, he was simply so detached that it was hard to tell the difference. Sid Halley, of course, had the wreck of his hand and the end of his racing career to blame. Daniel Roke in For Kicks felt trapped by his life and responsibility to his younger siblings. All of them rediscover life in the course of their stories, except Hawkins. And I suppose that he does, too, in a way - it isn't really that his depression is lifted, he just decides that his life debt to someone else compells him to continue living. Depressing.
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