Iced

Product Information

For over forty years, the London University grad helped father Dick Francis (31 Oct 1920 – 14 Feb 2010), ex-jockey known for horse-racing mysteries. And that continued right to the end, after which I shut down my Kindle and said to myself, "Self, that was very well written and a darned good story. That's Ok, but I still liked the "typical" Dick Francis guy----strong, stubborn, capable, trustworthy, comforting, kind, loyal, quiet-----it was funny, but at the END of this novel, Miles finally almost turns into that guy! Things look bright in his career when finally his feelings of loneliness, depression, inconsistent riding ability, and growing self-loathing along with nightmares and anxiety attacks catch up with him, complicated by consuming alcohol to cope and the bodily stress of trying to maintain riding weight.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It doesn't help that, as a jockey, he faces a lot of other stresses ranging from the obsessive need to lose weight to remain eligible to race and the pressure put on him to win races and the public's written and spoken pressure when he doesn't win. He's abandoned the entire horseracing industry to preserve his mental health but the speed and danger of racing down an icy course at high speed fills his need for adventure.

I got into this straight away, there is a real easy flow and reading style to this book, already gripped by the description of a race down the world famous, adrenaline boosting Cresta Run. It’s a long time since I’ve wanted to punch a fictional character in the face quite as much as I did with this one.

Ir does improve and is quite interesting as an account of the destructive effects of mental illness and alcoholism.When once again the story was going back to his early career I was finished with the tedious and minutely detailed descriptions of the sport. On a personal note, one minor issue for me was that I had a little bit of trouble sometimes keeping track of the shifts from past to present and back. After the race is over the the horse expected to win doesn't, Miles questions the result and doesn't like the answer he finds, but he also isn't sure what to do about it (if anything). Despite a rather slack pace, it has many of the elements that I remember fondly, including the immersion in details of another milieu (in this case a triple header of steeplechase racing, ice-based horse racing, and skeleton racing on the Cresta Run in St. Later when Miles is doing a practise ride on the Cresta run someone has put something on the track, at the speed he is going Miles has no chance of stopping and ends up hitting the obstruction at high speed.