Book Review: The Danger

I finished The Danger by Dick Francis at about midnight on Tuesday. I don't know if I've read this one before or not. I suspect that I have as there were one or two scenes I felt I could just about have predicted before they were complete, but that could be because I consider myself such a Dick Franciscan.

One of the aspects of his writing that I enjoy, and have a new respect for now that I've tried it myself, is Francis' ability to have a story that revolves around horse racing and not have the main character be a part of the horse racing world. In The Danger, the main character is a hostage negotiator. He happens to fall into the racing world when a spate of kidnaps infects the horse racing world.

Not much in the way of vocabulary, but I highlighted some passages.

In this first the main character is describing to another character a father who is upset by the kidnapping of his son. A great sample of an interesting simile.

"John Nerrity is like one of those snowstorm paperweights, all shaken up, with bits of guilt and fear and relief and meanness all floating around in a turmoil. It takes a while after something as traumatic as the last few days for everything in someone's character to settle, like the snowstorm, so to speak, and for all the old patterns to reassert."

This next describes the main character talking to the police chief. I like the way Francis allows his own character to describe a dominant feature of himself, phrasing suggestions as questions.

"'Andrew!' The beginnings of exasperation. 'What's been going on?'

'Will you be coming here yourself?'

A short pause came down the line. He'd told me once that I always put suggestions into the form of questions, and I supposed that it was true that I did. Implant the thought, seek the decision. He knew the tap was on the telephone, he'd ordered it himself, with every word recorded. He would guess there were things I might tell him privately.'"

This final passage describes the way that the main character feels about America.

"I felt liberated, as always in America, a feeling which I thought had something to do with the country's own vastness, as if the wide-apartness of everything flooded into the mind and put spaces between everyday problems."

It's a good, solid, Francis book. I enjoyed it. Unlike many of his and other mystery books, this one ends rather abruptly. There is no denouement, just a quick sentence or two after the climax. The reader is forced to imagine the rest. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.