Rat Race (Hardcover)

by Dick Francis (Author) "I picked four of them up at White Waltham in the new Cherokee Six 300 that never got a chance to grow old..." (more)
Key Phrases: weighing room, crew room, dear chap, Colin Ross, Annie Villars, Kenny Bayst (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Matt Shore, small job pilot with a large painful past, transports dabblers, die-hards, a racketeer or two along with a brace of jockeys to the track. An apparent attempted murder of one, bomb scares and the trail of a con artist bring Matt down to earth, more than once. Tiresome but the fans are not ready to ground him yet. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
Matt Shore was an experienced pilot. He'd done it all. From big jets to flying in supplies to war zones. So when he gets a job ferrying high class punters around England's race courses he might be forgiven for expecting the quiet life. But then his plane explodes in a massive fireball. He could have been in it. Some quiet life. Instead he's landed in the middle of a nightmare world where there is big money at stake. Very big money. From then on he finds himself hurtling down a tortuous trail where people are not all they appear, and all around him is sudden bloody death...'Impossible to stop reading' - "Daily Telegraph". --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Harpercollins; First Edition edition (March 1971)
• ISBN-10: 0060113227
• ISBN-13: 978-0060113223
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,805,408 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars this is a pretty good dick francis, , April 14, 2005

By	C. Elgin "akitonmyers" (Palo Alto CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rat Race (Mass Market Paperback)

It's kind of strange, but every Dick Francis is pretty much the same. It's strange because only two of his many books have the same lead character. What Francis does is find a profession, research what may pertain to said profession, and then plop his readymade protagonist and story-line into this situation.

The gift that Francis has is that as a reader I really don't mind that I have seen this plot and character twenty times before. The authors prose is elegant in its way and it allows the reader easy access to a world that is fascinating to visit. Whenever I think of Francis as an author I think of Cocteau, the French director who built worlds where poets were the rock stars of society. Francis does this with jockeys. Every time you open up one of his books, the jockey is on the highest echelon of culture even if the other characters don't realize this.

Rat Race is either a fine place to start on Francis if you have not read him before, or it is one of his more captivating short novels if you are looking for a next title in the series. If you want his best book in my opinion, try 'In the Frame.'

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Usual story, June 20, 2000

By	Fax (Tokyo, Suginami-ku Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rat Race (Mass Market Paperback)

If you are a Dick Francis fan, this book will neither disappoint nor surprise you. It's more or less like all his other books--similar hero (average to himself, to those around him stoic, tough, cool under pressure) in the standard situation (doing his job, which gets interfered with, when the hero feels called upon to take care of the interferers, which act reveals to him his true personality, plus down-toned love story). This one involves airplanes--also not unusual for a Dick Francis book. I sound critical. But I really enjoyed it--thus the stars--and though it isn't likely to burst anyone's literary bubbles or change their lives, it certainly provides an entertaining and exciting couple of hours. Which is the objective.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dick Francis with a difference, August 10, 2006

By	Chai (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rat Race (Mass Market Paperback)

For readers like me who find most of Dick Francis's books a little chilling, this early (1971) entry to his collection is delightfully different from the others. As pilot Matt Shore investigates a series of bombings apparently aimed at one of his passengers, famous jockey Colin Ross, the points of similarity to Francis's later race-course thrillers will be obvious: a manly, laconic hero; race-course settings; a good dose of violence towards the end. But the characters here are drawn with a warmth and humanity too often missing in Francis's later works, and the writer seems truly interested in their relationships. I love the moment when the hard-as-nails trainer suddenly turns on one of the other passengers in Matt's small plane and tells him off for his lamentable self-absorption--only to find that the slightly-crooked jockey she's been at odds with throughout the story is cheering her on; the scene in the attic of a stately ducal mansion, where Matt finds the gentle and kindly, if somewhat befuddled, Duke of Wessex absorbed in playing with his ten-year-old nephew and the model trains they both love; the picnic Matt shares on a riverbank with the famous jockey and his sisters, who generously open their family to include a near-stranger even while they deal with their grief at knowing that one of the young women is fatally ill--all those and any number of other moments lift this from the deadliness of the standard contemporary crime thriller into something more meaningful, and make this a book worth reading, or even reading again.