£10
FREE Shipping

Iced

RRP: £20.00
Price: £10
£10 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

The other thing great literature does is use layered metaphors and the way in which the crime and the preparator came to light was a great play on the 'neck and neck' racing we see so much of in racing. Martin Jarvis was the narrator for the audiobook version of this novel, and he was all wrong for the role. However, he need have no fears on the writing front that he’s not as good, if not better than, his father. After the race when he sets the horse back in its stall and begins to remove his harness, he realizes that the horse lost because it was weighted down with lead weights hidden in the harness, the breast girdle, and his leggings. Alternate passages of the book swing between the present day in St Moritz and Miles’ rise towards fame – and then descent into failure – as a steeplechaser.

It is slow and boring unless you are interested in the technical detail of professional horse riding, which I am not. All he wants Miles to do is give the horses a short run early morning and to saddle up one of the horses whilst Jerry does the other. But then I realized at one point, that the famous "Dick Francis" character, always displaying more or less the same characteristics, despite different job descriptions in every book, was missing! The slight description of Miles’s parents, his father, Jim the great equestrian and his worrywart mother did not leave much of an impression.Not your usual crime thriller, and for once I was still curious as to who the villain was until the very last moment.

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.

Now he gets his adrenaline rush from riding down the Cresta Run, a three-quarter-mile Swiss ice chute, head first, reaching speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. He seems to have his life together and we wonder about those intervening years between his younger life that was falling apart to this older life when he seems to have it together. You know how sometimes when people talk and their lips get stuck on their dry teeth, and you can hear it when they are speaking?

Miles waits to confront Jerry, but when the horse Jerry was holding comes into the stables alone, Miles goes looking for Jerry and finds him face downon the ice, when he rolls him over he sees Jerry seems to have had a good beating, but refuses to let Miles get the police or and ambulance. He feels that he could have saved his mother if he had been paying better attention but conflicts about his future plans had them estranged at the time of her death. Through the past parts of the story we learn how his career as a jockey came to an end, what happened leading up to it and after. He could have had Miles perform death or gravity defying maneuvers anywhere but if the author could get a paid vacation to one of the most exclusive and picaresque places, he might as well take advantage of the situation.The pace was a little slower, and I didn’t feel there was the element of suspense that I felt in the previous book. More than a mystery, at least for the first third of the book, it was more the character study of a disintegrating man. Barely any mystery, way too much alcoholism, some insta-love with the MC and his nurse, and then the worst part: the chapters kept flipping back and forth between the past and the present - but, with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER. In his bio, it says he taught physics and electronics for years, and I thought perhaps he ought to incorporate what he KNOWS into his novels. I was disappointed because I was looking forward to a mystery, however I did gain insight to the mental health issues and their impact on an individual.

We expect to do what we have done before, to exist in familiarity, and habits are the manifestation of mostly unconscious, involuntary actions. I did like this story but did not like Miles’s self-pity, self-harming(drinking and luging) and general inertia. Felix Francis studied Physics and Electronics at London University and then spent seventeen years teaching Advanced-Level Physics.The whole story is told through Miles as the narrator, the things he has to deal with at such a young age, decisions he makes as he starts to grow into a young man. His mother will begin a struggle to pay the bills, and eventually commits suicide, for which Miles also blames himself. 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. However, this one is slightly different in so far that it is set in St Moritz in the Swiss Alps, where, every year, racehorses compete on a track built right on the frozen lake. Allegedly, she can relate because she has some OCD issues, which I am not a doctor but OCD and alcoholism do not seem all that similar.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop