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. ICED is the 54th Dick Francis novel (my 15th) and again, and as always, portrays the rich world of horse racing. He has a very narrow scope of things, namely anything that inconveniences him is bad and anything that supports him is good. His father had maneuvered the car so that he caught the full force of the collision on his side of the car.

The love interest, Rachel is another character with no purpose other than how can she be of service to master Miles. These pressures seem only to be kept at bay by the bottle, but Miles doesn't realize he's an alcoholic, despite misjudgments and a series of increasingly serious accidents.While I enjoy Felix Francis as a worthy successor to his father's (mother's, some say) literary mantle, this book seemed more to be a recovery exercise or penance.

Another decision that irked me was incorporating two benefactors, Susi Ashcroft and Barbara Fenton as pivotal characters.He is thrown from the drive side to the passenger side to lay on Miles lap for over an hour until they can be cut from the wreckage. Someone does try to murder Miles by dropping a bag of cement onto the Cresta course which could have killed Miles when his sled hit it. Surprisingly, even the constant changes from past to present, that I normally find really confusing, were very well written. Starting out as a young jockey is tough, a competitive world then there is rivalry with some who believe he is only where he is because of who his father was. The story is a little hard to follow in that it shifts in time from his steeplechase time seven years ago to the present, focusing on events that shaped (and continue to shape) the person he's become.

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. As a kid, I would read the backs of baseball cards (clearly I was super popular) so I have a better than average threshold for sports minutiae yet my eyes were glazing over at the various strategies and locales. Miles’ mother later commits suicide when he is in his last years of schooling and he finds her body. It's a slow burn book and you're going to learn quite a lot about the problems of addiction and alcoholism along with the attendant mental health issues. On the other hand, this was balanced by my pleasure in learning more about the sport of toboggan racing, and also about horse racing on the ice, which, prior to this, I had no idea existed.That's Ok, but I still liked the "typical" Dick Francis guy----strong, stubborn, capable, trustworthy, comforting, kind, loyal, quiet-----it was funny, but at the END of this novel, Miles finally almost turns into that guy! 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. More than a mystery, at least for the first third of the book, it was more the character study of a disintegrating man. He also tries to emulate his father, pursuing jump racing, but perpetually battling the brutal weight requirements and the demands of his boss, stable owner Jerry Dickinson, horses, and owners. Great pains are stressed to enumerate the times he has to starve himself to make weight as a jockey.