Sunday, November 30, 2008

Risk - Dick Francis

This is the story of a righteous accountant, Roland Britten, who is also a jockey. And it is horse racing which is his first love. But being righteous, he has his share of enemies, the people whose scams he has caught as an accountant, and subsequently reported to the authorities.

It is one of them, apparently, who gets Roland kidnapped and confined in a small dark room. He escapes, and then again gets kidnapped and gets confined in another small dark room. Interim he tries to figure out who was out to get him, and his kidnappers, since they aren’t exactly professionals, do leave a trail which Roland manages to unravel. But that might just have been a very bad idea.

A large chunk of this story is about the confinement of Roland Britten. And while the narration isn’t as fear inducing as say Stephen King’s Misery or Gerald’s Game, it fits well into the genre that Dick Francis writes.

The story flows with an easy narration and witty dialogues and is entertaining. Something that you can read very quickly and feel satisfied about it. Though I must say that the accounting practices in England are very strange indeed. Or atleast they were pretty strange when the book was published. Roland Britten goes about matching a lot of numbers around and about which is not something that any accountant or an accounting firm would do. Well, whatever the case may be, it does make for an entertaining story and a very plausible premise on which the plot is built.

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