When jockey Martin Stukely dies after falling in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen video tape. Logan, half artist, half artisan, is a glass blower on the verge of widespread acclaim for the originality and ingenuity of his work. Long accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass and in maintaining a glass-making furnace at never less than eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, Logan is suddenly faced with a series of unexpected and terrifying new threats to his business, his courage and his life. Believing the missing video tape to hold some sort of key to a priceless treasure, and wrongly convinced that Logan knows where to find it, a group of villains sets out to force from him the information he doesn`t have. Narrowly escaping these attacks, Logan reckons that to survive he must himself find out the truth. The journey is thorny, and the final race to the tape throws more hurdles and more hazards in Logan`s way than his dead jockey friend could ever have imagined. Glass shatters. Logan doesn`t...but it`s a close run thing.
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This time the mise en scène is the glass blowing studio owned by Gerard Logan, friend of the late Martin Stukely, a jockey who takes a fatal fall at the Cheltenham steeplechase during the last race of the century. Still mourning Martin, Gerard is savagely beaten, his workshop ransacked, and his life threatened by a gang of thugs. Investigating, Gerard discovers that the gang includes a domineering woman who's the daughter of Martin's valet and a scientist who's stolen valuable data from the laboratory that formerly employed him. They believe Gerard has possession of a videotape entrusted to him by Martin before his death and that the secrets on the tape are worth Gerard's life.
It's a good set up, with just enough of the usual horse lore and a pleasant love story involving Gerard and a pretty policewoman, neither of which overshadow the taut pacing and the well-worked-out plot. Francis's protagonists may be accidental heroes, but they're not antiheroes; they're usually eminently decent, likable men, and their sense of self is always interesting. Here's Gerard at home, in a break from the action, thinking about the new woman in his heart in a typical Francis love scene:
I walked deliberately through all the rooms, thinking about Catherine, wondering both if she would like the place, and whether the house would accept her in return. Once in the past the house had delivered a definite thumbs-down, and once I'd been given an ultimatum to smother the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper as a condition of marriage, but to the horror of her family I'd backed out of the whole deal, and, as a result, I now used the house as arbiter and had disentangled myself from a later young woman who'd begun to refer to her and me as "an item" and to reply to questions as "we." We think. No, we don't think.And, a few pages later,
The speed of development of strong feeling for one another didn't seem to me to be shocking but natural, and if I thought about the future it unequivocally included Catherine Dodd. "If you want to cover the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper, go ahead," I said.It may be Francis's English reticence that keeps him, mercifully, from spoiling a good mystery with what other writers consider the obligatory sex scene, or it just may be the mastery of his form that few of his peers approach. In every page of this terrific new book, he's at the top of it. --Jane AdamsShe laughed. "I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change them?"
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