Dick Francis was shortlisted for the Specsavers ITV3 Crime Thriller Bestseller Dagger 2009.
The second collaboration between Dick Francis and his son Felix brings us another great mystery thriller from one of the nations favourite authors. Murder at the race track, of course, when a jockey is found with a pitchfork through his chest.
When defence barrister Geoffrey Mason hears the judge's guilty verdict, he quietly hopes that a long and arduous custodial sentence will be handed down to his arrogant young client. That Julian Trent only receives eight years seems all too lenient. Little does Mason expect that he'll be seeing Trent again much sooner than he'd ever imagined. Setting aside his barrister's wig, Mason heads to Sandown to don his racing silks. An amateur jockey, his true passion is to be found in the saddle, on a thoroughbred, pounding the turf. But when a fellow rider is brutally murdered - a pitchfork driven through his chest - the prime suspect is champion jockey Steve Mitchell and the evidence is overwhelming. Mason, reluctant to heed Mitchell's pleas for legal advice, soon finds himself at the centre of a sinister web of threat and intimidation and is left fighting a battle of right and wrong, and more immediately, a battle of life and death...his own.
Dick Francis has written forty-one novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), his autobiography (The Sport of Queens) and the biography of Lester Piggott. He is rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world. He has received many awards, amongst them the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the genre. The Mystery Writers of America have given him three Edgar Allen Poe awards for the best novel of the year, and in 1996 made him a Grand Master for a lifetime’s achievement. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2000.
Felix Francis is the younger of Dick Francis’s two sons. Having spent seventeen years teaching A-level Physics, he took on the role of managing his father’s affairs in 1991. Over the last forty years, Felix has assisted with the research of many of the Dick Francis novels, not least Twice Shy, which drew on Felix’s experiences both as a Physics teacher and as a marksman, Shattered and Under Orders. With the publication of Dead Heat Felix took on a more significant role in the writing - Silks is the second novel of this father-and-son collaboration.
