Second Wind
New York, N.Y. Jove Books, 2000. Second printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. [8], 261, [3] pages. Includes Prologue, 12 Chapters, and an Epilogue. A hurricane-chasing trip to the Caribbean spells danger for English meteorologist Perry Stuart as a terrifying accident during his holiday excursion reveals deadly secrets that could get him killed. Richard Stanley Francis CBE FRSL (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010) was a British crime writer, and former steeplechase jockey, whose novels center on horse racing in England. After wartime service in the RAF, Francis became a full-time jump-jockey, winning over 350 races and becoming champion jockey of the British National Hunt. He came to further prominence in 1956 as jockey to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, riding her horse Devon Loch which fell when close to winning the Grand National. Francis retired from the turf and became a journalist and novelist. All his novels deal with crime in the horse-racing world, with some of the criminals being outwardly respectable figures. The stories are narrated by the main character, often a jockey, but sometimes a trainer, an owner, a bookie, or someone in a different profession, peripherally linked to racing. This person always faces great obstacles, often including physical injury. More than forty of these novels became international bestsellers. Francis is the only three-time recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best Novel. Britain's Crime Writers Association awarded him its Gold Dagger Award for fiction in 1979 and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Here the typical Francis hero is a young Englishman of a vanishing breed: smart, self-effacing although very good at his job, polite and thoroughly decent. Perry Stuart is a well-known TV weatherman for the BBC who was orphaned as a child and raised by his beloved, now crippled grandmother. Joining fellow BBC weatherman Kris Ironside on a flying jaunt into the eye of a Caribbean hurricane, Perry survives when the plane crashes and washes up on a tiny, apparently abandoned island where the houses were destroyed by the hurricane. In a hut, he stumbles across a safe containing a mysterious file folder whose contents he cannot decipher. After a crew wearing radiation-protection suits arrive by air to rescue him, Perry's troubles are only beginning, as he slowly becomes aware of a sinister scheme in which well-off people are brokering enriched uranium to foreign nogoodniks. Among the cast are mushroom mogul Robin Darcy and his flashy American wife, two old SIS spooks--think an aging James Bond and a tottery M--and a beautiful nurse who is Perry's circumspect love interest. Perry continues to encounter danger: the sabotage of another plane he's on, threats by a muscle-bound thug in Grand Cayman. Francis's writing is smooth and intelligent, moving the reader right along. Ex-RAF pilot and champion steeplechaser Francis knows his stuff--and of course race courses figure in the plot. Condition: Very Good.
Keywords: Perry Stuart, Meteorologist, Hurricane, Accident, Kris Ironside, Plane Crash, Radiation, Enriched Uranium, Sabotage, Robin Darcy, Grand Cayman
ISBN: 0515129232
[Book #81911]
Price: $12.50