Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: To the Hilt by Dick Francis ISBN: 0-515-12148-7 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: October, 1997 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42 (26 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: How to improve this book: Making the pages of chocolate
Comment: All of Dick Francis' stuff is great, and here's no exception. It's a quick read and nobody at a university is going to assign it as fine literature. Yet, Francis deftly involves issues of personal character in the presence of money and titles, not unlike Shakespeare's greatest hits.
Continually underscoring the two human races: the decent and the indecent (good and evil are too pure of terms for true-to-life characters), the author always emphasizes through his first-person account the stiff-upper-lip culture and maturity of England's ideal man.
Inventing tasteful ways to present sex and gore both, Dick Francis shows off good writing skills for even a jaded modern audience.
This tale combines all of the above and spices it with Scottish landscape, royal jewels, treachery, jealousy, castles, a National Trust busy-body, and of course...horses.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the great Dick Francis novels
Comment: This is one of the first Dick Francis novels I read, and it remains one of the best for me. If I read it in the larger context of his work, it does seem to be something of an anomaly--not first and foremost about horses, and not concentrating on action and the understated heroics that many Francis heros find themselves forced into. ...there is a depth to the character of Alexander--a sort of simultaneous self-undertanding and also a oneliness that he wishes he could get past--that is touchingly human. I actually think this book has much more depth than some of the more action-packed stories. I would recommend it.
Rating: 4
Summary: Always dependable, always enjoyable
Comment: Usually if one said that an author and his novels were dependable that would be synonymous with dull and boring. Not so with Dick Francis. He always manages to create stories and characters that grab the reader and hold on until the end.
In "To the Hilt," we have Alexander Kinloch, a painter whose specialty is golf and the places and people that involves. He lives in a bothy in the Scottish highlands where the solitude makes his work not only possible, but extraordinarily wonderful. However, the world intrudes in the shape of four burly men who beat the pulp out of him. They want to know where "it" is, and when they realize he has no idea what they mean they throw him down the mountain to his fate.
Over the next few weeks, he finds out what they were seeking and why. When Ivan, his step-father, has a heart attack, the authority to protect the older man's empire is given to him, a responsibility he is both willing and loath to accept. His step-sister, who resents his interference, begins intruding on his life and that of their parents. As she struggles to wrest power from him her father dies, leaving Alexander with total authority. Part of that responsibility is a string of race horses, bringing into the story the one absolute certainty of a Francis story.
However, he really shines in this tale when describing the artist's passion and obsession. Alexander meets an older woman, an antiquities expert, bent on "saving" a precious heirloom, and becomes haunted by her face, to the point that he feels compelled to paint her portrait. The reader gets the brush strokes and the feelings as the work forms under his hands. Even a non-artist has to say, "Yes, that's how it is." When she sees the finished work, she says, "You have made me immortal."
Anyone who likes mysteries will enjoy the clean writing in a Dick Francis novel. For the most part both story and characters are unambiguous. This is a quick read and totally enjoyable.
 |
Title: Wild Horses by Dick Francis ISBN: 0515117234 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: 10 Lb. Penalty by Dick Francis ISBN: 0515123471 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: Risk by DICK FRANCIS ISBN: 044922239X Publisher: Fawcett Books Pub. Date: 04 December, 1993 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: Flying Finish by Dick Francis ISBN: 0515125601 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: Decider by Dick Francis ISBN: 0515116173 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
