For Kicks by Dick Francis (1965)

I have no idea why this book was on my nightstand. Maybe I pulled it out of a "not read" pile some time ago, thinking it was science fiction I could relax with at some point. Dick Francis' name sounded familiar - maybe from my bookstore days. Science fiction it was not. More like thriller with horse racing. Francis was a jockey himself and wrote all of his books about the horse racing world. Interestingly enough, I mention the author to a colleague and she started gushing about having all of his books and loving them. Who knew.

Daniel Roke owns a horse farm in Australia and has been raising his brother and sisters after their parents died. Earl of October appears one day and offers him an undercover job to find out what is going on with some racehorses back in England, who win, act as if the have been doped up, but the tests come back clean. Daniel takes on the job, not for the money, but because he is bored back home and as he says at the end of the book - "for kicks."

I did enjoy how this self confident man made himself a simple stable boy and shifty character to get in behind the scenes of the horse world. I have read other books about the race horse world, so it was not new, but gave more detail here. Daniel put up with quite a bit of abuse to keep in character. Once the story was set up, there seemed to be a long lull, when nothing much happened, but then the last third of the book picked up and got enjoyable intense.

Since I was reading a book from 1965 I was wondering about the retro feel, but the story worked quite well. I think the advent of cell phones makes a huge difference in how plots are developed nowadays, as instantaneous communication is possible, and we don't have to rely on the post, or finding a phone, etc. One thing that surprised me was that Daniel was allowed to visit a female student at a university in her dorm room easily. Maybe it was different in England, but it seemed like when I first went to college a few years later, they had just gotten rid of all sorts of restrictive rules about visitors in the dorms. Don't expect to try any more of his books, but was pleasant enough.