Over a career that spanned forty-four years, from 1962 to 2006, Dick Francis wrote forty novels as a solo author and four of them featured Sid Halley, a former jockey who had become a private investigator. This is the last of the forty novels and the last to feature Sid Halley, which is, I think, an appropriate way for both Sid Halley and his creator to bow out.
For those who haven't made his acquaintance, Halley was a champion jockey until he had a horrendous racing accident that cost him is left hand. He was fitted with a prosthetic, but obviously his racing career was over. Halley found a second career as a private investigator and established a reputation as a tough, honest, intelligent operator. The cases he takes often involve the world of horseracing.
Such is the case here. A British lord named Enstone is concerned that his horses seem to be underperforming, losing races that they should be winning. He asks Halley to investigate to see if, for some reason, someone is causing them to lose. At the same time, Halley accepts another case in which he is asked to investigate the relatively new business of on-line betting as it affects the horse racing industry.
Halley barely gets started with the investigation before a jockey who often rides for Lord Enstone is shot to death at a racecourse. The police fairly quickly settle on a suspect that Halley believes to be innocent and so he turns his attention to the murder as well. As things progress, they get increasingly complicated and increasingly dangerous, not just for Sid Halley but for those he cares most about.
This is an interesting novel for a couple of reasons. Halley, who has long been divorced, is in a new relationship with a woman named Marina, and she looks like she might finally be the one for Halley. Their relationship is a key part of the novel. Additionally, the book relies heavily on DNA evidence, which was still in its infancy when this book was written. Apparently the police in Britain are not using it in any significant way yet, but fortunately, Marina works in a lab where the new techniques are being used for other purposes and so Halley is able to rely on the lab for help in investigating the case. There's plenty of action in the novel and a lot of twists and turns. If I were to make any complaint about the book, it would be that the villain of the piece does not measure up to the standard that Francis set in so many of his earlier books, and doesn't really seem to be an opponent worthy of Sid Halley.
Under Orders is certainly not the best of the Francis novels, but it's still a pretty good book to go out on, and this, then, completes my assignment of reading and reviewing all of the Dick Francis novels. Francis would go on to write a couple of other books in concert with his son, Felix, and Felix Francis has now taken over the franchise. For a variety of reasons, I have no interest in reading books in a series that I have thoroughly enjoyed when the original author dies or passes the baton to someone else. The sole exception to this rule is that of Ace Atkins who has taken over Robert B. Parker's Spenser series and who is doing an excellent job with it.
Given that, I have not and will not be reading any "Dick Francis" novels written by anyone else, his son included. The forty novels written by Francis himself, with the assistance of his wife Mary who was his principal researcher, are more than sufficient as far as I'm concerned.
