Shattered
After 41 novels, most writers run out of energy before the final gallop. But Dick Francis's latest thriller is as good as his earliest. Perhaps  it's because this one is dedicated to the Queen Mother, who celebrated her centennial in 2000, and who, like her famously horsey daughter, shares Francis's passion for the races. Or maybe he's just found his stride again, after a few less-than-outstanding starts. Here he does one of his best tricks: lures you into a somewhat arcane area you might know little about and explicates it so brilliantly that you don't even realize how much you've learned (in this case, about glass blowing) while a  mystery is unraveled, a crime is solved, and the hero gets the girl.This time the mise en scène is the glass blowing studio owned by Gerard  Logan, friend of the late Martin Stukely, a jockey who takes a fatal fall at the  Cheltenham steeplechase during the last race of the century. Still mourning  Martin, Gerard is savagely beaten, his workshop ransacked, and his life  threatened by a gang of thugs. Investigating, Gerard discovers that the gang  includes a domineering woman who's the daughter of Martin's valet and a  scientist who's stolen valuable data from the laboratory that formerly employed  him. They believe Gerard has possession of a videotape entrusted to him by  Martin before his death and that the secrets on the tape are worth Gerard's  life.It's a good set up, with just enough of the usual horse lore and a pleasant love  story involving Gerard and a pretty policewoman, neither of which overshadow the  taut pacing and the well-worked-out plot. Francis's protagonists may be  accidental heroes, but they're not antiheroes; they're usually eminently decent,  likable men, and their sense of self is always interesting. Here's Gerard at  home, in a break from the action, thinking about the new woman in his heart in a  typical Francis love scene:I walked deliberately through all the rooms, thinking about  Catherine, wondering both if she would like the place, and whether the house  would accept her in return. Once in the past the house had delivered a definite  thumbs-down, and once I'd been given an ultimatum to smother the pale plain  walls with brightly patterned paper as a condition of marriage, but to the  horror of her family I'd backed out of the whole deal, and, as a result, I now  used the house as arbiter and had disentangled myself from a later young woman  who'd begun to refer to her and me as "an item" and to reply to questions as  "we." We think. No, we don't think.And, a few pages later,The speed of development of strong feeling for one another didn't  seem to me to be shocking but natural, and if I thought about the future it  unequivocally included Catherine Dodd. "If you want to cover the pale plain  walls with brightly patterned paper, go ahead," I said.She laughed. "I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change  them?"It may be Francis's English reticence that keeps him, mercifully, from spoiling  a good mystery with what other writers consider the obligatory sex scene, or it  just may be the mastery of his form that few of his peers approach. In every  page of this terrific new book, he's at the top of it.--Jane Adams