Dick Francis has 40 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.9★ across 146 ratings. The most-rated is The Edge.
The Edge
Summary
To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation, and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars. Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior, on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all. On board, a troupe of actors are playing out a murder mystery to amuse their wealthy passengers. Ideal cover for a secret investigator with secrets of his own. And ideal cover, as it turns out, for an ice cool blackmailer with murder on his mind.
©1988 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Longshot
Summary
John Kendall knows how to survive. He's written six handbooks on the subject. Now he wants to become a novelist, preferably without starving to death. But when cold and hunger set in, Kendall impulsively accepts an unlikely job.
He is to research and write a biography of Tremayne Vickers, a famous racehorse trainer. Staying at Vickers' home in rural Berkshire, Kendall soon learns to like his host and friends, learns to ride racehorses, learns about murderers ... and how his own survival tips can become deadly traps.
©1990 Dick Francis
Knock Down
Summary
It’s the classic law of the invader. Get to the strongest guy and smash him, then watch the weaker ones fall like ninepins. Which is just what a vicious gang of horse dealers decides to do when their little kickback scam is threatened with a spot of old-fashioned honesty.
But they haven’t reckoned with bloodstock agent Jonah Dereham, a man who belies his quiet exterior with a steely and implacable resolve. They can threaten him, try to burn down his home, even attempt to kill him. But they’ll soon wish they hadn’t.
©1974 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Driving Force
Summary
A dead hitchhiker, empty canisters found at the bottom of several trucks, and the murder of a harmless mechanic are the bizarre events that lead ex-jockey Freddie Croft to suspect that his transport company, Driving Force, is involved in drug smuggling, or something far worse.
©1992 Dick Francis (P)1993 Recorded Books
Slay-Ride
Summary
A British jockey, riding in Norway, has disappeared, and with him has gone a day's takings from the turnstiles of Oslo racecourse. The Norwegian police have found no trace of him, nor have the British, and the case is being filed as just one more unsolved theft. David Cleveland, investigator for the Jockey Club, is a last resort. He goes without much expectation, and finds himself in waters as dark and deep as the fjords.
©2014 Tony Britton (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Crossfire
Summary
Captain Thomas Forsyth’s second tour of Afghanistan is cut brutally short when he’s badly wounded by a roadside bomb. Tom’s world is torn apart by the injury – the Army is his life. The thought of never rejoining his regiment is a terrifying prospect and one that he is not willing to entertain. Tom returns to Lambourn, to his childhood home, where his mother is a racehorse trainer and the ‘First Lady’ of racing. Never having seen eye to eye with his parents, Tom doesn’t expect a hero’s welcome – but even he’s not prepared for the reception that awaits him. When his mother’s prize horse finishes a disappointing last place in a race he should have won, Tom discovers that the training business is on the edge, and facing a threat far more dangerous than a run of bad form. Tom finds himself on a very different, but just as deadly, battlefield where his military skills are tested ... kill or be killed?
©2010 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Silks
Summary
When defence barrister Geoffrey Mason hears the judge’s 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 looking Trent in the eyes 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 in the heat of a steeplechase. But when a fellow rider is brutally murdered – a pitchfork driven through his chest – Mason’s racing life soon becomes all too close to his working life. The prime suspect is one of their brethren, champion jockey Steve Mitchell; the evidence is overwhelming.
Mason is reluctant to heed Mitchell’s pleas for legal advice – but soon he finds himself at the centre of a sinister web of threat and intimidation. Mason is left fighting a battle of right and wrong, and more immediately, a battle of life and death ... his own.
©2008 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Odds Against
Summary
Amazing what bodily injury could do for a man.
A fall from a racehorse had left brilliant jockey Sid Halley dangerously depressed, with a wrecked hand and the need for a new career. And now a bullet wound was helping him find one. He'd been with a detective agency since his racing accident, but it wasn't until some two-bit hoodlum drilled a slug into his side that he was sent out on a case of his own.
That was where he met Zanna Martin, a woman who just might make life worth living again. But it was an even-money bet that he'd be killed before he had the chance.
©1965 Dick francis (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Hot Money
Summary
Malcolm Pembroke never expected to make a million pounds without making enemies. Nor did he expect his latest wife to be brutally murdered. All the clues suggest the killer comes from close to home, but after five marriages and nine children, that still leaves the field wide open.
When he find his own life in danger, Pembroke entrusts his safety to his estranged son, Ian, an amateur jockey; and through him discovers a compulsive new outlet for his financial expertise. Soon he's playing the international blood stock market for incredible stakes. Not the safest bet for a man on the run from avaricious relatives. Particularly when one of them's got a bomb.
©1987 Dick Francis
Whip Hand
Summary
Sid Halley had one good hand and another made of metal. Five hundred pounds of horse had landed on him, directly ending his career as a brilliant jockey - and indirectly ending his marriage to the woman he loved. He had become a private investigator, quite a good one, though his new life could never erase the haunting memories of his past glories. But it was only when the wife of one of England's top trainers came to beg his help in preventing some foul play at the track that Sid Halley began to know what being haunted really was.
©1979 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Reflex
Summary
Philip Nore is nearing the end as a jockey. George Millace is finished in photography. The differnce is, Millace is dead, and Nore has discovered his secret: a set of files which would blow the top off the racing world. Hated by a dying grandmother he has never known and abused by a trainer he knows only too well, Nore is no stranger to shabby morals. And when he begins to decipher the dead man's photographs, he uncovers corruption on a scale he had never imagined.
©1980 Dick Francis
The Danger
Summary
A beautiful Italian girl driving home in an open top sports car, a little boy playing on a South Coast beach and the senior steward of the Jockey Club on his way to a press reception in Baltimore. One after the other they suffer the same nightmare ordeal - kidnapping. But there is one thing connecting these particular cases. For the Italian girl is a jockey, and the little boy an only son of a racehorse owner. A picture of the person behind this international chain of crime starts to emerge - a lover of Verdi, a man with a cool and calculating brain and an aficionado of the racing world. Andrew Douglas, brought in to advise and help the victims and their families, proceeds with all his customary diplomacy and courage. Only to find himself playing a dangerous part: the role usually reserved for his clients.
©1983 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Come to Grief
Summary
Sid Halley, the ex-champion jockey turned investigator who appears in Odds Against and Whip Hand, is back and facing new dilemmas and dangers. The opening finds him having uncovered an obnoxious crime committed by a friend whom he, and everyone else, has held in affection bordering on love. On the morning set for the opening of the friend's trial, at which Sid is due to be called as a witness, other people's miseries explode and send him spinning into pulverizing days of hard, rational detection and heart-searching torments. Troubled, courageous, and unwilling to admit defeat, for Sid Halley it is business as usual.
©1995 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Break In
Summary
Family ties mean trouble, but when jockey Kit Fielding comes to the aid of his twin sister and her husband, Bobby Allardeck, even death threatens. Putting behind him an age old feud, Kit tries to find out who is behind a vicious newspaper campaign which is jeopardising Bobby's career as a racehorse trainer. Combining his investigations with riding winners he makes some startling discoveries.
©2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Risk
Summary
When he wakes in a pitch-black room with his hands bound, Roland Britten – accountant and champion steeplechase jockey – knows he’s entered a nightmare of someone else’s making. Wracking his brain to figure out who’s out to get him and why, he comes up empty, but somehow manages a death-defying escape. It isn’t long, though, before he’s recaptured. Now, with his life at stake, he must take every risk to outsmart his well-disguised enemy and save himself ...
©1977 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Bonecrack
Summary
Violence suddenly takes the lead in the life of Neil Griffon. Following a grisly accident that lands his father in the hospital, Griffon finds himself in charge of his father's stables. Before he has a chance to get his bearings, he is brutally assaulted and abducted. The price for his freedom will mean the betrayal and deception of those who trust Griffon most.
Griffon has no choice - a no-compromise crime czar gives him an ultimatum he dare not refuse. The czar insists that his own 18-year-old son be hired by Griffon's stable so he can ride the superstar horse, Archangel, in the Derby. And his son must be trained to win. Or else.
©1989 Dick Francis (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Blood Sport
Summary
When English agent Gene Hawkins told his boss he'd forego his vacation to search for millionaire Dave Teller's prized missing stallion, he didn't know his retainer would include the attention of his boss's beautiful teenage daughter - or Teller's seldom sober wife. He also didn't know that a trail from London to New York to Las Vegas to California would lead eventually to murder.
©1967 by Dick Frances (P)1995 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Dead Heat
Summary
The night before the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket sees the great and the good of the horse-racing community gathered for a black-tie gala dinner, cooked by Max Moreton. However, Max's food is soon suspected of putting 24 guests in hospital with food poisoning.
©2007 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Bolt
Summary
When Kit Fielding, champion steeplechase jockey, finds out that his chief patron, Princess Casilia, is facing an increasingly serious threat, he goes unhesitatingly to her aid. Neither realises that his instinctive support is the first step towards a frightening battle involving violent risk, with the honour of the princess's family as the prize and Kit's own destruction as the forfeit.
Beset by other problems, not least his troubled romance with Danielle, the princess's niece, Kit knows that while steering through a maze of deadly outside dangers and riding at breakneck speed in races, he must also contend with the long-term hatred of his own family's enemy. Many of the characters from Break In reappear in this superbly told story.
©2014 Dick Francis (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Enquiry
Summary
To a jockey, losing his license is the equivalent of being struck off, or disbarred, or cashiered. When steeplechase rider Kelly Hughes lost his license his first feelings were of bewilderment and disbelief, for he was not guilty of the charges. Nor, to the best of his knowledge, was the trainer he had ridden for, who lost his livelihood as well. When his first stunned state of shock subsided, Kelly began to wonder why he had been framed, who had done it, and how it had been achieved. He did more than wonder: he began to search. The nearer he came to the solution the fiercer grew the retaliation. But Kelly had been left with nothing much to lose, the only serious strategic mistake his enemy had made. A first-rate story of men in the racing game.
©1969 Dick Francis (P)2014 Audible, Inc.