Reflex (A novel by Dick Francis) - Published in 1980 - Insurance conspiracy

Phillip Nore is lying with his face in the mud - thrown off an ill tempered, poorly trained horse; as he trudges uphill to where the rest of the jockeys are in the weighing room, he is constantly reminding himself of why he is a steeplechase jockey - he loves riding, he loves horses, and frankly, he doesn’t know how else to spend his life, other than pursuing his second love, amateur photography. He is reminiscing about another famous photographer - George Millace, father of Steve Millace, twenty three, serious jockey, upset that his prize winning dad is no more and his mum’s house has been burgled. Phil had been riding Steve’s horse, incidentally, when he had a fall.
Getting ready one day for his next race with Daylight, Phil is brimming with confidence as he is certain that he’ll win the race; however, the horse’s trainer Harold Osborne asks him to deliberately lose, just so that Victor Briggs, a moneyed horse owner who owned most of Osborne’s horses, had placed a bet on another horse winning. Harold does not want to displease his boss, and would rather compromise on the fair rules of the game than earn Victor’s ire. Phil is thirty years old, and has worked with Harold for seven years; he lost races intentionally for three, and knows full well that if he  were to disobey the boss’s orders, he might lose his job and worse, he may never be employed elsewhere either. However, Phil does not accept any remuneration for these fixed races, and refuses Victor’s generous offerings.




And so, Phil loses the race, so does Steve Millace, who also nurses a fractured collar bone and asks Phil to drive him to his mother’s in Ascot. The young man mentions to Phil how the late George Millace appreciated Phil’s talent for photography and thought he would make an ace photographer. As they near Steve’s home, they are shocked to see an ambulance and police car parked outside. Steve’s mother has been beaten black and blue, furniture is broken, the surroundings are in disarray. Phil accompanies the lady and her son to hospital, but not before he collects George’s ‘rubbish’- old film negatives and photographs, to sift through later.
Meeting a lawyer friend of his later, Phil sits down with Jeremy Folk and the two are surprised at the contents of George’s box. Some years ago, a man called Elgin Yaxley had received a huge sum in insurance after five of his thoroughbreds had been shot dead, the killer -Terence O’Tree had been sent to prison. Yaxley had told the authorities that he had never met O’Tree, and had no idea who he was; yet, George had photographed the two men at a French Café two years ago, before the incident had taken place (according to the date on the picture) – Terence was imprisoned and Elgin had raked in all the insurance money and gone away to Hong Kong. Obviously, the presence of the picture negated the man’s claims, and implicated him in fraud - could this be the reason why George’s house was ransacked and his poor wife attacked?
A refreshing story, told in Francis’s smooth and simple style of writing, Reflex will capture your imagination as the motive for murder and fraud take the reader by surprise. Phillip Nore is the quintessential Francis hero - principled and young, attractive and humble. Worth reading!

Athabasca (published in 1980) - by author Alistair Maclean - a thriller set in an Alaskan oil refinery

Alistair MacLean is a Scottish writer who specialized in writing thrillers and crime stories. He was third son of a Scottish minister and joined the Royal Navy during the world war two. He was a senior torpedo operator at the height of his career. He was in the thick of the war theater during the world war and saw action on many fronts especially the arctic north. After retiring he started penning his novels based on the war he saw and many of them became best sellers. MacLean never looked back as a writer until his death in 1987.
Athabasca published in 1980 is a action thriller which happens in the Arctic oil refinery. In many ways it is similar to night with out an End, with murder, sabotage and rescue undertaken by tough men in an unforgiving terrain and environment.
The operation manager of an oil company operating in Prudhoe Bay Alaska gets a ransom note to pay a billion dollars to avoid any damage to the installation. The criminal threatens to blast the oil pipelines in Alaska and another one in Canada, thus plunging the world in to a crisis.



So the company directors bring in Jim Brady Enterprises who are specialist in oil field operations. They also double as anti- sabotage experts. Dermot and Mackenzie, the best in the field arrive at Alaska to foil the criminal designs of the saboteur. But their investigations lead them haywire and the unthinkable happens. The operations manager is murdered and one of the petrol pumps in the Trans-Alaskan pipeline is damaged. So they call their boss, Jim Brady to help them with the investigations, but to no avail. The body count keeps on increasing and the criminals keep striking at will.
In these difficult times humor is something which keeps the whole action going. The investigators engage in friendly banter and keep swigging spirits. MacLean is said to have written this book during his whiskey dependent days and it sure shows. Dermot is severely injured and a lot of twists in the plot happen. In the end the criminals who include Bronwski and co are arrested and the king pin Reynolds who was using them as a cover is unmasked in a public meeting. All is well with the bashful Jim Brady and his motley group of investigators. Dermot finds love and escorts her home while Jim Brady again calls another round of drinks.
This is not one of McLean's well known effort and in fact it has been pilloried by all sections of readers. The action and the suspense which sustains in his earlier book is missing. Dermot and Mackenzie are pretty laid back in their investigations and loose their grip on the proceedings. The wry humor exhibited by many MacLean leading men is also missing. MacLean is famous for compressing his action in few pages that the readers are at the edge of the suspense. He usually writes the plot in a taut and water tight manner that the reader never puts the book down. But in Athabasca the plot meanders a lot and the reason for the sabotage itself becomes clearer after 60 odd pages. If you are a first time reader, MacLean has written wonderful tales, so try it after this.