Additional information
by Dick Francis (Author)
New York Times bestselling grand master of crime fiction
Jockey Freddie Croft discovers a high-stakes conspiracy that exposes the seedy underside of horse-racing-and faces deadlier odds of survival than in any steeplechase run.Back Jacket
It's life and death neck-and-neck in the stretch in this, Dick Francis's thirty-first horseracing thriller. Young ex-jockey Freddie Croft owns a profitable fleet of horse vans that convey runners to the course. A man who has few illusions about racing's smarmier aspects, Freddie is a stickler for security. But even he is startled by the violence that erupts when a hard, fast rule is broken: Never pick up a hitchhiker. In what will be the first of many ironies, the passenger - not the driver - turns up dead. And if one corpse is bad for business, what happens next could well be fatal: Freddie is swept unknowingly into the vortex of a malign conspiracy in which appearances deceive and the cost of being duped is murderously high. Tilting at the shifting shadows cast by his elusive adversaries, he must summon up extraordinary guile and courage to protect his enterprise - and save his life. Driving Force is Dick Francis at his most tantalizingly complex and dramatically propulsive - the kind of top-drawer suspense no aficionado can resist.
Author Biography
Dick Francis (pictured with his son Felix Francis) was born in South Wales in 1920. He was a young rider of distinction winning awards and trophies at horse shows throughout the United Kingdom. At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot, flying fighter and bomber aircraft including the Spitfire and Lancaster.
He became one of the most successful postwar steeplechase jockeys, winning more than 350 races and riding for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. After his retirement from the saddle in 1957, he published an autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write more than forty acclaimed books, including the New York Times bestsellers Even Money and Silks.
A three-time Edgar Award winner, he also received the prestigious Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger, was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2000. He died in February 2010, at age eighty-nine, and remains among the greatest thriller writers of all time.
