Silks

Silks is one of Dick Francis’s late co-written novels (with his son Felix Francis), published in 2008, and a clean example of why his career-long formula keeps working. Geoffrey Mason is a London criminal defense barrister who rides as an amateur jump jockey on weekends. When his only real friend at the racetrack, Scott Roder, is murdered shortly after an argument they both attended, Mason ends up defending the obvious suspect, who is also clearly innocent, while quietly trying to figure out who actually did it.

Francis’s books always live or die on their professional fingertips, and Silks does the dual-profession trick better than most: the barrister procedural is fully present (clerks’ rooms, robing room banter, fee politics, juniors, silks), and the jump-racing material is even sharper, since the elder Francis was a champion jockey before he started writing. The villain in Silks is a touch obvious, but the courtroom-and-stables structure carries it. A late-career four-star Dick Francis is still better than most mid-career thrillers in the same shelf.

Recommended for fans of legal thrillers in the Francis Fyfield / Frances Fyfield range and for readers looking for books like Dick Francis’s earlier classics (Whip Hand, Reflex, Banker) but with a courtroom layer. New Francis readers can start here. Solid four stars.