Sunday, August 18, 2013

Nerve by Dick Francis

Finished on 7/29.

Francis does a very nice line in titles. In this one a jockey, Rob Finn, who is beginning to gain a reputation as someone who can be put up on the worst mounts because he is utterly fearless, is set up and made to appear to have lost his nerve. This he proceeds to prove to be utterly untrue by tracking and dealing with a vicious and ruthless racing insider.

Francis also gives his character a great deal of depth beyond the racing setting. He is the complete outsider in a family of musicians. This certainly telegraphs that he is determined to go his own way regardless of a level of pressure under which many of his colleagues have collapsed - even to the point of suicide.

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