It’s amazing what bodily injury can do for a man. A fall from a racehorse left brilliant jockey Sid Halley dangerously depressed, with a wrecked hand and the need for a new career. It was a bullet wound that helped him find one.

hampion jockey Robert Sherman has disappeared right before his wife was about to give birth. And right before he was sure to win the National. A coincidence? British investigator David Cleveland doesn’t think so. He’s convinced someone made Sherman disappear, but with every answer David gets, the body count rises. And if he isn’t careful, the next body might just be his own.

Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.

Hired to fly four racing buffs to the track, pilot Matt Shore expects it will be the kind of job he likes: quick and easy. That is until he’s forced to make an emergency landing just minutes before the plane explodes. Luckily nobody is hurt, but it isn’t long before Matt realizes that he’s caught up in a rat race among violent criminals, who are dead set on putting anyone who stands in their way on the wrong side of the odds.

Dick Francis, the bestselling master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing. In the middle of the night, two masked men break into Neil Griffon’s home and abduct him. He quickly discovers that unless he agrees to their unreasonable demands, they will destroy his father’s precious horse and racing stable, and ultimately Neil himself. Returned to his father’s stables, he must find a way to bring down these criminals, because having to choose between his integrity and his life is no choice at all.

A superbly crafted collection of thirteen tightly plotted tales that treats listeners to murder, mystery, and mayhem in the world of horseracing. With his remarkable blend of unrelenting suspense, finely tuned narrative, and lean, stylish prose, New York Times bestselling author Dick Francis proves that he is as much a master of the short story as he is of the novel in this thrilling collection.

The victory was hollow for Alan. He had been running a close second behind his good friend Bill Davidson, when Bill’s horse unexpectedly jerked as he soared over the steeplechase fence. Now, Bill was dead from his injuries, and Alan knew it wasn’t an accident. A small menacing thread of wire dangled from the top of the fence—a carefully constructed plot of malice. Curious, Alan begins an investigation that points to corruption that transcends the racing circuit—seeping into the town surrounding the track.

For a generous commission, ex-prizewinning jockey Jonah Dereham reluctantly agrees to bid on a young steeplechaser on behalf of a wealthy American woman. But his life is thrust into danger immediately following the auction, when he receives a blow to the head by two thugs demanding ownership of the horse.

Australian horse breeder Daniel Roke had resisted the exorbitant sum of money offered by a suave Englishman to investigate a scandal involving drugged racehorses. But after another investigator dies mysteriously, Roke agrees to fill his shoes, and learns that men who would give drugs to horses are capable of doing much worse to human beings …

When reporter Bert Chekov falls to his death, his colleague James Tyrone is suspicious. Chekov’s column had recently recommended some ‘can’t-lose’ horses, who then wound up out of the running on race day. Tyrone thinks he can prove it was murder, but he may not live to tell the tale. Because as the dead man has already made clear, there’s no such thing as a sure thing...

When jockey Martin Stukely dies after a fall at Cheltenham, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape. Logan is a glassblower on the verge of widespread acclaim.

After receiving death threats, an ex-jockey trainer friend calls Sid, a private investigator, to ask for his help, but Sid has his own problems to deal with, like recovering from surgery and saving his crumbling marriage. When his friend's stable yard is torched and the friend is found dead, Sid can only blame himself for not helping sooner. The police think it's suicide, but Sid is not convinced after his friend's terrified phone calls. With a guilty heart, Sid starts to investigate and soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that cuts to the very heart of British horse racing.

Henry Grey is a man who needs a change. His job as an office worker is as tedious as the women his mother sets him up with. His new job transporting thoroughbred racehorses to exotic international destinations should perk up his mundane existence. However, when he intercepts a cryptic message hidden in the bottom of a smuggled bottle of birth control pills, Grey learns that horses are not his only cargo.

Despair, suicide, and obsessive hatred, mixed well with humor, love, and horses, brew up into the story of a battle between one man's nerve and another man's cunning. Robert Finn, steeplechase jockey, finds himself the focus of a malicious campaign, which is also afflicting his friends. He sets out to discover its source and remove it.

Steeplechase jockey Derek Franklin has had more broken bones than he cares to count, but it seems his latest injury could very well bring his days on the race course to a screeching halt. But that’s the least of his concerns when his brother turns up dead, leaving Derek as the sole inheritor of his estate. It doesn’t take long for Derek to learn that his brother—a magistrate who imported and sold semiprecious stones—was keeping more than his share of secrets.

An unbearably tense novel of revenge, murder, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. The single-mother families of the isolated community under the shadow of the Pyderhorn, Bergen's greatest mountain, are being terrorised by a teenage gang. But teenage violence is nothing compared to what awaits detective Varg Veum when he gets to know the blue-eyed Wenche Andersen.

Polly has two sets of memories.... One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was 10 and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother's house. Polly's just beginning to recall the sometimes marvelous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed. But what did she do? Why can't she remember? Polly must uncover the secret, or her true love - and perhaps Polly herself - will be lost.

Charged with gross incompetence, Satan is fired from his job as prince of Hell and exiled to that most terrible of places: English suburbia. Forced to live as a human under the name of Jeremy Clovenhoof, the dark lord not only has to contend with the fact that no one recognizes him or gives him the credit he deserves but also has to put up with the bookish war-gamer next door and the voracious man-eater upstairs.

For six dreadful months, David Corstorphine has tried to come to terms with his young wife's death while caring for his three motherless children. Try as he may, David is unable to return to work, and his only form of solace comes from working in the garden of his parents' estate in the Scottish countryside. Dispatched unexpectedly to New York, David's family hopes that the impromptu business trip will help him get back on his feet. But the journey proves both disastrous and heartening.

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings - a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, and many more.

Meet Jack Irish, criminal lawyer, debt collector, football lover, turf watcher, trainee cabinetmaker, and the best Australian crime character we've seen in years. When Jack receives a puzzling message from a jailed ex-client, he's too deep in misery over Fitzroy's latest loss to take much notice. Next thing Jack knows, the ex-client's dead and he's been drawn into a life-threatening investigation involving high-level corruption, dark sexual secrets, shonky property deals and murder.

Jim Henderson is one of six guests summoned by the mysterious Edwin Carson, a collector of precious stones, to a weekend party at his country house, Thrackley. The house is gloomy and forbidding, but the party is warm and hospitable except for the presence of Jacobson, the sinister butler. The other guests are wealthy people draped in jewels; Jim cannot imagine why he belongs in such company. After a weekend of adventure with attempted robbery and a vanishing guest, secrets come to light, and Jim unravels a mystery from his past.

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

Now, for the first time, Herron’s short fiction has been collected into one volume. In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five stand-alone nerve-racking and thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoë Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House.

In 1921, the bloodied bodies of Colonel Fletcher, his wife and two staff are found in a manor house in Surrey. The police have put the murders down to a violent robbery, but Detective Inspector Madden from Scotland Yard has his own suspicions. In the meantime the killer is plotting his second strike.

World War II has just ended, and Britain has established the Control Commission for Germany, which oversees their zone of occupation. The Control Commission hires British civilians to work in Germany, rebuild the shattered nation, and prosecute war crimes. Somewhat aimless, bored with her job as a provincial schoolteacher, and unwilling to live with her overbearing mother any longer, 30-something Edith Graham applies for a job with the Commission - but she is also recruited by her cousin Leo, who is in the Secret Service.

Erin Coleridge's used bookstore in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, England, is a meeting place for the villagers and, in particular, for the local Jane Austen Society. At the Society's monthly meeting, matters come to a head between the old guard and its young turks. After the meeting breaks for tea, persuasion gives way to murder with extreme prejudice when president Sylvia Pemberthy falls dead to the floor. Poisoned? Presumably, but by whom? And was Sylvia the only target?

Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.

It's the end of the roaring twenties, and the exuberant and Honourable Phryne Fisher is dancing and gaming with gay abandon. But she becomes bored with London and the endless round of parties. In search of excitement, she sets her sights on a spot of detective work in Melbourne, Australia. And so mystery and the beautiful Russian dancer, Sasha de Lisse, appear in her life. From then on it's all cocaine and communism until her adventure reaches its steamy end in the Turkish baths of Little Lonsdale Street.

hampion jockey Robert Sherman has disappeared right before his wife was about to give birth. And right before he was sure to win the National. A coincidence? British investigator David Cleveland doesn’t think so. He’s convinced someone made Sherman disappear, but with every answer David gets, the body count rises. And if he isn’t careful, the next body might just be his own.

The victory was hollow for Alan. He had been running a close second behind his good friend Bill Davidson, when Bill’s horse unexpectedly jerked as he soared over the steeplechase fence. Now, Bill was dead from his injuries, and Alan knew it wasn’t an accident. A small menacing thread of wire dangled from the top of the fence—a carefully constructed plot of malice. Curious, Alan begins an investigation that points to corruption that transcends the racing circuit—seeping into the town surrounding the track.

For a generous commission, ex-prizewinning jockey Jonah Dereham reluctantly agrees to bid on a young steeplechaser on behalf of a wealthy American woman. But his life is thrust into danger immediately following the auction, when he receives a blow to the head by two thugs demanding ownership of the horse.

Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.

When globe-hopping British First Secretary Peter Darwin returns to his childhood home for a visit, he is sorry. Waiting for him were long-hidden memories, a string of racehorse deaths and homicide. As Darwin begins to realize that the key to all of it involves his own past, he wishes he'd never come back, because he just might never leave again—alive.

Tim Ekaterin raised millions of dollars to finance the purchase of Sandcastle, a champion racer, only to discover an apparent defect in the horse. Investigating further, Ekaterin learns that the business of investment banking is nothing compared to the cutthroat world of horseracing—a world where violence and murder only raise the stakes....

Hired to fly four racing buffs to the track, pilot Matt Shore expects it will be the kind of job he likes: quick and easy. That is until he’s forced to make an emergency landing just minutes before the plane explodes. Luckily nobody is hurt, but it isn’t long before Matt realizes that he’s caught up in a rat race among violent criminals, who are dead set on putting anyone who stands in their way on the wrong side of the odds.

The catastrophic power of a giant hurricane can raise coastal waves 30 feet high and blow through houses at devastating speeds. For TV meteorologist Perry Stuart, however, such predictions are hypothetical, as he chiefly predicts periods of English drizzle - until a fellow forecaster offers him a Caribbean hurricane-chasing ride in a small airplane as a holiday diversion. But a frightening accident teaches Stuart more secrets than wind speeds.

Dick Francis, the bestselling master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing. In the middle of the night, two masked men break into Neil Griffon’s home and abduct him. He quickly discovers that unless he agrees to their unreasonable demands, they will destroy his father’s precious horse and racing stable, and ultimately Neil himself. Returned to his father’s stables, he must find a way to bring down these criminals, because having to choose between his integrity and his life is no choice at all.

Architect and family man Lee Morris never gave much thought to the shares he inherited of the Stratton Park racecourse, the multi-million dollar property owned by the powerful Stratton family. His mother had first received the shares to keep her quiet about the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her first husband, Keith Stratton. Now, much to Lee's chagrin, he is being drawn into the thick of the Stratton family squabbles as they wage a furious debate over the future of the race track.