Iced

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It is interesting, particularly when looking at the news and seeing people in the public eye facing similar problems.

Moving across dual timelines we learn about Miles earlier life, his family and career as a jockey and what happened for it to go disastrously wrong. It’s not long before Miles suspects who it was, especially when he himself gets cornered, but what do they want? Add to that the adrenalin-producing excitement of the Cresta Run, and the novel has all the ingredients for an action-packed rollercoaster ride of emotion and skulduggery. He has run into his old boss/trainer, Jerry, who asks for a bit of help at the White Turf horse race in St. The style of the books has changed (for the better, I think) since they were under the sole authorship of Dick Francis and it is eleven years since Francis senior died.I wish they could have at least given him a backstory on his money woes, instead of he lived the jet set lifestyle. This really was a story about insecurity, mental health, alcohol addiction, and lots of poor choices. He confronts the bad guy, has worked out how he did it, and makes an elaborate plan to fix everything (they never go to lawyers or court or killing, it's always done quietly behind the scenes, "Only we have to know about this") and goes off to live happily ever after.

The two periods in his life collide when his former boss Jerry Dickinson cajoles him into helping out by taking one of his two horses for a run and saddling up the other before a race. She spends a few hours talking with him on the phone and a half a day touring her hometown and that is enough for her to change her life. He has a verbally abusive trainer, Jerry, who fully aware of his parents’ demise still treats him like garbage.Great pains are stressed to enumerate the times he has to starve himself to make weight as a jockey.

Both triumph and disaster are ever present, but those imposters are ultimately dwarfed by exploitation and an addiction which see a promising career in ruins almost before it began. Having grown up with Dick Francis, it was great to saddle back up with this new story from the Felix Francis stable! I could not take to the format of running parallel timeliness of Mike Pusset all the way through the book. Characters as usual, our hero not quite the well heeled successful jockey he would like to be, but now, the love interest comes quite late on in the book, the villains are not so villainous towards our hero and he is cured of his hang ups.

Miles’ mother later commits suicide when he is in his last years of schooling and he finds her body. It is the first book by Felix Francis that I have read, and I will definitely be looking out for more of his books in the future. Thanks so much to Hayley Cox, Midas PR, Felix Francis and Simon and Schuster UK for my copy of this book. The saddest part is as they lose confidence in themselves they are used by others who have power over them. People in the story kept saying, "You're a disgrace, I'm glad your father is not here to see you" "You'll never be the jockey your father was" and so on.

For Miles who was quite tall he was always battling, which meant not eating or drinking before getting weighed, because if he came in pound over he wouldn’t be allowed to race. Having read the previous novel Guilty not Guilty by Felix Francis I was excited to get the opportunity to read this one. It doesn't help that, as a jockey, he faces a lot of other stresses ranging from the obsessive need to lose weight to remain eligible to race and the pressure put on him to win races and the public's written and spoken pressure when he doesn't win.We expect to do what we have done before, to exist in familiarity, and habits are the manifestation of mostly unconscious, involuntary actions. But when he sees that something suspicious is going on, Miles can't help but look for answers, even when it puts him in danger. 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. The aspects of PTSD, depressive psychosis and mental health issues discussed were carefully used I thought but could be triggering for some, so be wary.