Product Description

Charles Todd makes a living as a painter of horses. However someone is making a fortune forging paintings by the masters and then selling them to people who usually end up dead. Charles arrives in Australia to investigate and is immediately on the trail of the fraudsters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102010 in Books
• Published on: 1978-06-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
The horses age painted ones this time, but stop worrying. You won't have a moment to miss the hooves and the muck. Charles Todd, master of equine portraiture, stumbles on a pattern: visitors to Australia purchase horse pictures and, in no time at all, their homes are burglarized. In the case of Todd's kinsman, the burglary also involves murder, so it's Down Under for the Franciscan confrontation between a resourceful loner and a ruthless crime-conglomerate. Action, character, and color ride in perfect balance again (last year's High Stakes teetered a bit), and the "Am I my brother's keeper?" motif returns in subtle high gear, just to remind us that Francis stays on top because he remembers to touch bottom. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Dick Francis's fastest and finest
In later years, Dick Francis diluted his brand a little by churning out too many novels that were too much the same, but this one is vintage (an apt term since the development of Australian wine exports is a plot point) and, in my opinion, his finest. From the opening page, in which the hero arrives for a family visit and is dumped in the middle of a crime scene, you are in the thick of things and the pace never lets up: especially as this is a chase novel as well as a mystery. Painter Charles Todd finds himself playing gooseberry to his newly-wed best friend and wife as they help him keep one jump ahead of art-forging crooks in a rampage around Australia. The local colour is great ('Come to paint Australia red!' enthuses one character), crazy comedy alternates with high drama, and even characters we only meet for a page or two have an immediate reality.
Francis has his limitations: not least the way his gorgeous heroines seem to manifest their 'impact-making intelligence' mainly by hanging on the hero's every word and asking all the right questions. Still, he manages to pack more nuance into fewer pages than almost any other thriller-writer. For the record, I think his other best books are Slay Ride, Odds Against, Smokescreen, and Forfeit. Flying Finish, Bonecrack and Reflex are good as well.

An absolute beaut!
Synopsis: Charles Todd is a painter; of horses, mainly. When he visits his cousin and discovers a nasty crime, he gradually becomes involved in trying to solve a series of robberies; this takes him to Autralia, and the Melbourne Cup. He's ably assisted (albeit rather reluctantly) by his friends Jik and Sarah. Slowly, he finds out more and more - but so do the villains.

Nearly all of Francis' early, middle and early-late books are genuine smashers; some even better than others. And I agree with the review above that this is one of his five best. Tight plot, excellent locations, excellent character interactions, funky dialogue, gradually mounting tension with explosions of even higher tension!
One of Dick Francis most enjoyable books, and you don't get much better than that.