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Come to Grief
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
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Odds Against
- Written by: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Amazing what bodily injury could do for a man. A fall from a racehorse had left brilliant jockey Sid Halley dangerously depressed, with a wrecked hand and the need for a new career. And now a bullet wound was helping him find one. He'd been with a detective agency since his racing accident, but it wasn't until some two-bit hoodlum drilled a slug into his side that he was sent out on a case of his own. That was where he met Zanna Martin, a woman who just might make life worth living again.
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Still Great Reading!
- By michele on 2023-10-02
Written by: Dick Francis
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Dick Francis's Gamble
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- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
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Felix Francis co-wrote several horse racing mysteries with his late father Dick Francis before the legendary author passed away in 2010. Taking up the reins for his first solo effort, Felix delivers a captivating tale that franchise fans will thoroughly enjoy. Former jockey Nicholas “Foxy” Foxton is at the track one day when he witnesses the execution-style killing of his friend Herb Novak. Worried he might be next, Foxy wonders if there was a dark side to Herb he didn’t know about.
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Reflex
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Philip Nore is nearing the end as a jockey. George Millace is finished in photography. The differnce is, Millace is dead, and Nore has discovered his secret: a set of files which would blow the top off the racing world. Hated by a dying grandmother he has never known and abused by a trainer he knows only too well, Nore is no stranger to shabby morals. And when he begins to decipher the dead man's photographs, he uncovers corruption on a scale he had never imagined.
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spell binding
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Longshot
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- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
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John Kendall knows how to survive. He's written six handbooks on the subject. Now he wants to become a novelist, preferably without starving to death. But when cold and hunger set in, Kendall impulsively accepts an unlikely job. He is to research and write a biography of Tremayne Vickers, a famous racehorse trainer. Staying at Vickers' home in rural Berkshire, Kendall soon learns to like his host and friends, learns to ride racehorses, learns about murderers ...
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Good!
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Decider
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- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
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Free choice? There's no such thing, according to Lee Morris. Choice is pre-ordained by your personality. Stratton Park racecourse faces ruin in the hands of a squabbling family. Lee is slowly sucked into the turmoil, unwillingly on the surface but half-understanding the deep compulsions that influence his decisions. One road leads to safety, another to death. How do you know which is which?
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one of the best from Dick Francis
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Straight
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- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
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Derek Franklin is an injured jockey. The last fence at Cheltenham has left him on crutches. But his brother’s death means even bigger trouble. He inherits a jewellery business, a mistress – and some very shady business associates. Franklin likes to play things straight. But with £1.5 million in diamonds gone missing, he finds honesty can be a deadly virtue.
Written by: Dick Francis
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Odds Against
- Written by: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Amazing what bodily injury could do for a man. A fall from a racehorse had left brilliant jockey Sid Halley dangerously depressed, with a wrecked hand and the need for a new career. And now a bullet wound was helping him find one. He'd been with a detective agency since his racing accident, but it wasn't until some two-bit hoodlum drilled a slug into his side that he was sent out on a case of his own. That was where he met Zanna Martin, a woman who just might make life worth living again.
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Still Great Reading!
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Written by: Dick Francis
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Dick Francis's Gamble
- Written by: Felix Francis
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Felix Francis co-wrote several horse racing mysteries with his late father Dick Francis before the legendary author passed away in 2010. Taking up the reins for his first solo effort, Felix delivers a captivating tale that franchise fans will thoroughly enjoy. Former jockey Nicholas “Foxy” Foxton is at the track one day when he witnesses the execution-style killing of his friend Herb Novak. Worried he might be next, Foxy wonders if there was a dark side to Herb he didn’t know about.
Written by: Felix Francis
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Reflex
- Written by: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Philip Nore is nearing the end as a jockey. George Millace is finished in photography. The differnce is, Millace is dead, and Nore has discovered his secret: a set of files which would blow the top off the racing world. Hated by a dying grandmother he has never known and abused by a trainer he knows only too well, Nore is no stranger to shabby morals. And when he begins to decipher the dead man's photographs, he uncovers corruption on a scale he had never imagined.
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spell binding
- By JOHN on 2018-07-05
Written by: Dick Francis
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Longshot
- Written by: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
John Kendall knows how to survive. He's written six handbooks on the subject. Now he wants to become a novelist, preferably without starving to death. But when cold and hunger set in, Kendall impulsively accepts an unlikely job. He is to research and write a biography of Tremayne Vickers, a famous racehorse trainer. Staying at Vickers' home in rural Berkshire, Kendall soon learns to like his host and friends, learns to ride racehorses, learns about murderers ...
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Good!
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Written by: Dick Francis
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Decider
- Written by: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Free choice? There's no such thing, according to Lee Morris. Choice is pre-ordained by your personality. Stratton Park racecourse faces ruin in the hands of a squabbling family. Lee is slowly sucked into the turmoil, unwillingly on the surface but half-understanding the deep compulsions that influence his decisions. One road leads to safety, another to death. How do you know which is which?
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one of the best from Dick Francis
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Written by: Dick Francis
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Straight
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- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Derek Franklin is an injured jockey. The last fence at Cheltenham has left him on crutches. But his brother’s death means even bigger trouble. He inherits a jewellery business, a mistress – and some very shady business associates. Franklin likes to play things straight. But with £1.5 million in diamonds gone missing, he finds honesty can be a deadly virtue.
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Proof
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At an annual party to celebrate the success of the racing season, everything seemed to be running well to form, including the need for more champagne. Then a runaway horsebox ploughed into the marquee. A witness to the terrible death and destruction, wine merchant Tony Beach knows it is just one of those tragic accidents. But when his expert advice is called into play over sub-standard alcohol in a local night club, connections start to click, and another person dies, horribly.
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Good Story
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Tim Ekaterin's merchant bank, like all banks, only invests in sure things. Now he's about to involve it in ₤5 million of prime horseflesh, a stallion called Sandcastle. Top breeders reckon it's the safest bet in racing. But racing doesn't just attract the money men of the city. It's riddled with all kinds of dubious dealmakers. People who don't think twice about breaking bones. People to whom no bet is safe until it's paid in blood, Ekaterin's blood.
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incredible
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Smokescreen
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When a sick friend asks Edward Lincoln to investigate the comprehensive failure of a string of racehorses, he agrees to help out. But it is impossible for him to go about the task quietly and unnoticed because he is now a world-class star of action films, in which he always plays the hero. And the apparently easy survey of the string of racehorses blows him through a smokescreen into circumstances, where, to survive, he has to make himself become the man everyone else already thinks he is.
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Peter Darwin was hoping for some quiet leave from the Foreign Office. Instead he found himself in the village of his childhood, at the service of a veterinary surgeon whose operating theater was rapidly acquiring an unwanted reputation as an abattoir. The sudden unexplained death of a string of valuable racehorses from one small area in Gloucestershire was a mystery the police couldn't solve. But Darwin was local. He remembered people and what was at stake. And now he knew enough to get himself killed.
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To the Hilt
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The house was stripped bare of all its treasures. Gone was the furniture, the family silver, the paintings and the antique china. And if that was a shock for Charles Todd, painter of horses, how much more harrowing was the trauma for his cousin Donald, whose house it was and whose young wife lay on the sitting room floor, bloody and dead... A coincidental meeting with a middle-aged widow sends Charles off to Australia, on the trail of a gang with a fruitful business in forging works of art.
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The Edge
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To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation, and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars. Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior, on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all.
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audio issues p
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Knock Down
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It’s the classic law of the invader. Get to the strongest guy and smash him, then watch the weaker ones fall like ninepins. Which is just what a vicious gang of horse dealers decides to do when their little kickback scam is threatened with a spot of old-fashioned honesty. But they haven’t reckoned with bloodstock agent Jonah Dereham, a man who belies his quiet exterior with a steely and implacable resolve. They can threaten him, try to burn down his home, even attempt to kill him. But they’ll soon wish they hadn’t.
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Another Great One
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Hot Money
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Malcolm Pembroke never expected to make a million pounds without making enemies. Nor did he expect his latest wife to be brutally murdered. All the clues suggest the killer comes from close to home, but after five marriages and nine children, that still leaves the field wide open. When he find his own life in danger, Pembroke entrusts his safety to his estranged son, Ian, an amateur jockey; and through him discovers a compulsive new outlet for his financial expertise.
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Family ties mean trouble, but when jockey Kit Fielding comes to the aid of his twin sister and her husband, Bobby Allardeck, even death threatens. Putting behind him an age old feud, Kit tries to find out who is behind a vicious newspaper campaign which is jeopardising Bobby's career as a racehorse trainer. Combining his investigations with riding winners he makes some startling discoveries.
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Loved the traditional mystery
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Shattered
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When jockey Martin Stukely dies following a fall in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape. Gerard Logan is a glass-blower on the verge of widespread acclaim for his work.
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Songbird
- Kings Lake Investigation Series, Book 1
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Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, after months of waiting and wondering, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder. As the investigation proceeds, the detectives at Kings Lake Central find themselves visiting familiar places and talking to some familiar faces, while old enmities reappear in the incident room. Before this is over, Chris Waters will need to make a career-changing decision.
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If you enjoyed DC ...
- By Robert on 2019-10-14
Written by: Peter Grainger
Publisher's Summary
Sid Halley, the ex-champion jockey turned investigator who appears in Odds Against and Whip Hand, is back and facing new dilemmas and dangers. The opening finds him having uncovered an obnoxious crime committed by a friend whom he, and everyone else, has held in affection bordering on love. On the morning set for the opening of the friend's trial, at which Sid is due to be called as a witness, other people's miseries explode and send him spinning into pulverizing days of hard, rational detection and heart-searching torments. Troubled, courageous, and unwilling to admit defeat, for Sid Halley it is business as usual.
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What listeners say about Come to Grief
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall

- C. Johnson
- 2010-01-23
Excellent narrator! Classic Dick Francis
I have listened to all of Dick Francis' more than 40 books. The plot line of this one is gruesome, but fairly imaginative. Of course, Sid, the main character, gets attacked. That's standard fair in most DF stories. The sub-plot of the sick child is touching and is woven well into the main plot.
The range of Tony Britton's voice is impressive. He does several british accents very well, and moves easily between male, female and child voices.
The experience of the story is greatly enhanced by Tony's narration.
The four star rating is due to uneven sound quality in the production. This recording was clearly taken from cassettes, as the sound quality quickly shifts from crisp and clear to muffled. You can still hear the entire story.
Without regard to production quality, I highly recommend this book.
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5 people found this helpful
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- K. Danielson
- 2011-10-06
Read this one Third
If you like one Dick Francis mystery, you will probably like them all (if you get a good reader - which is usually the case fortunately). He wrote four mysteries featuring ex-jockey Sid Halley: Odds Against (1965); Whip Hand (1979); Come to Grief (1995); and Under Orders (2006). Even though the books span 40 years, the elapsed time within/between all the stories is about 3 or 4 years. Technology advances with the times from book to book and we aren't supposed to notice that as readers. After all, it's really the mysteries and Francis' quality writing that we're here for, isn't it?
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2020-05-28
Great read / Listen
I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and the narration is excellent. I highly recommend this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- L J
- 2019-02-18
The only Dick Francis I didn't like.
This was the one and only dark & horrible story by Francis. Not probable. Not enjoyable. Not fun. Not interesting. Concept & novel should not have ever been published. I've owned horses, and this was painful to finish. Otherwise, Dick (& Felix) are the best.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Lissa
- 2016-03-05
Great third story of Sid Halley
Would you listen to Come to Grief again? Why?
I enjoyed this story. Sid Halley is an interesting character. The reader was good with different voices for characters. Recommend it.
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- Doug Wilkie
- 2014-11-22
Great story, well written
Would you consider the audio edition of Come to Grief to be better than the print version?
Have only listened to the audio version.
What other book might you compare Come to Grief to and why?
Many other Francis books
Have you listened to any of Tony Britton’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Always well done.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It showed as in real life that celebrities can be involved in real life. As in life many celebrities are put on higher planes were they are viewed as above reproach, but we all need to come to the realization that celebrities are human and capable of being criminals.
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- Rosemary
- 2011-10-10
Another Dick Francis Classic
Another Dick Francis Classic. Great with a fast moving engaging plot, a page turner,a great companion for anyone.
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