Talk about adding insult to injury, not only does Capt. Thomas Vincent Forsyth lose his foot in an IED blast in Afghanistan, he now has to share a roof with his mother and stepfather at their home in Lambourn, with whom he has been at odds for the past fifteen years. Choosing the army way, he ran away from home at the age of seventeen, slept on the stairs of the army recruiting office in Oxford and was commissioned as a private in the Grenadier Guards; today, he returns to the grim prospect of the future as a disabled war veteran of the British Army.
Although her son has been wounded, and has lost the use of his leg, yet Thomas’s mother - Josephine Kauri - is in an extremely foul mood. She is not known as the ‘first lady of British racing’ for nothing. Thomas finds out the reason for his mother’s rancor soon enough - her horses have been losing at the races, and what with taxes and debts mounting, the lady wonders how long it will be before she loses everything. To make matters worse, she has been defaulting on payment of her taxes, using the money to invest in fraudulent hedge funds, avoiding payment of the VAT as well.
Add to this the fact that she’s been caught - and now along with the other expenses has to also pay an anonymous blackmailer two thousand pounds to keep quiet. Her husband is listless and inert, a mute spectator as she tries to salvage her financial position in vain. Thomas has been fitted with a prosthetic leg, but since the injury is still so recent, he suffers from ghost limb, he is not able to get used to the artificial leg and is constantly obsessing about whether or not he will ever be able to join the army again.
He is embroiled, soon, in his parents’ woebegone finances, and takes it upon himself to trace the source of the blackmail. And so, our one man army prepares for a different sort of battle, well camouflaged and armed with his trusty ceremonial army sword. His quest leads him to the manor house of his childhood love Isabella. Everyone at the dinner in her home is under the scanner, as the Captain uses his skills from the battlefields to help him sniff out the blackmailer. As his independent investigation progresses, someone wants him dead or at least in the least interfering of positions. Thomas is kidnapped and imprisoned in an abandoned stable - reminiscent of Francis’s own physical discomforts such as the collarbone fractured twelve times - however, after a harrowing experience, Thomas manages to escape.
Francis retired from the races at 36, and wrote his first novel in 1962. He has to his credit almost forty books and has won accolades such as The Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970 & 198o, to name a few. He was declared the Commander of the British Empire in 2000. The book is dedicated to the memory of Dick Francis; he died in the year 2010, also the year of Crossfire’s release, his final novel - the fourth written in collaboration with his physicist son Felix Francis.
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Although her son has been wounded, and has lost the use of his leg, yet Thomas’s mother - Josephine Kauri - is in an extremely foul mood. She is not known as the ‘first lady of British racing’ for nothing. Thomas finds out the reason for his mother’s rancor soon enough - her horses have been losing at the races, and what with taxes and debts mounting, the lady wonders how long it will be before she loses everything. To make matters worse, she has been defaulting on payment of her taxes, using the money to invest in fraudulent hedge funds, avoiding payment of the VAT as well.
Add to this the fact that she’s been caught - and now along with the other expenses has to also pay an anonymous blackmailer two thousand pounds to keep quiet. Her husband is listless and inert, a mute spectator as she tries to salvage her financial position in vain. Thomas has been fitted with a prosthetic leg, but since the injury is still so recent, he suffers from ghost limb, he is not able to get used to the artificial leg and is constantly obsessing about whether or not he will ever be able to join the army again.
He is embroiled, soon, in his parents’ woebegone finances, and takes it upon himself to trace the source of the blackmail. And so, our one man army prepares for a different sort of battle, well camouflaged and armed with his trusty ceremonial army sword. His quest leads him to the manor house of his childhood love Isabella. Everyone at the dinner in her home is under the scanner, as the Captain uses his skills from the battlefields to help him sniff out the blackmailer. As his independent investigation progresses, someone wants him dead or at least in the least interfering of positions. Thomas is kidnapped and imprisoned in an abandoned stable - reminiscent of Francis’s own physical discomforts such as the collarbone fractured twelve times - however, after a harrowing experience, Thomas manages to escape.
Francis retired from the races at 36, and wrote his first novel in 1962. He has to his credit almost forty books and has won accolades such as The Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970 & 198o, to name a few. He was declared the Commander of the British Empire in 2000. The book is dedicated to the memory of Dick Francis; he died in the year 2010, also the year of Crossfire’s release, his final novel - the fourth written in collaboration with his physicist son Felix Francis.
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