The Wilt Inheritance (Published in 2010) - More problems for Wilt - Authored by Tom Sharpe

Written when he was 82 years old, The Wilt Inheritance is author Tom Sharpe’s last book in the Wilt Series. Like its predecessors, this book too has Wilt entangling himself in mind blowing crazy scenarios from which it looks impossible to get out. Not his best work, but the book is quite a laugh, especially for Sharpe loyalists, who will feel a tad nostalgic towards the central character and his antics.
Tom Sharpe died 3 years after the publication of this book, due to complications resulting out of diabetes. He was 85 at the time, and said to be working on an autobiography. A witty and engaging writer, Sharpe did not necessarily move with the times in his books (they seems to be locked in an era of dial telephones and quiet Sundays), but he did attempt it never the less. This book has Wilt showcased in the 21st century.
In the Wilt Inheritance, Wilt is stuck as the nominal Head of the Communication Department at the Finland University. He is teaching students whom he does not want to teach. But, he can’t afford to lose this job. It’s the money from this uninteresting lack luster job, which is after all paying for the quadruplets private school fees and the maintenance of his wife Eva’s every demand. If all this had not already caused him a headache, his wife decides to sign him up for a summer job.




This summer job entails tutoring the step-son of a wealthy but lusty local aristocrat. His step father has hopes of sending him to Cambridge. However, once Wilt does start tutoring him, he realizes that the boy is not only a complete idiot who probably would not be able to find the bus to go to Cambridge, but also dangerously violent. Wilt learns that the boy owns a gun, which he shoots at any object which is moving, or sometimes not necessarily moving.          
Gradually the situation starts to unravel, and Wilt decides that it is time to use this now deteriorating state of affairs to his advantage. He finds a way in which the current scenario could not only put him at a financial advantage, but also give his snooty wife Eva, some tensions and headaches of her own.
While the book is not his best work, it is still worth a read and quite entertaining. It is amazing how effortlessly Tom Sharpe can develop a believable situation, and then push its boundaries to crazy extremes where it no longer seems believable. The entire scenario, with his amoral horrible little monsters for girls, a wife who seems to have perfected the snooty attitudes of high society, and wilt himself- a constant magnet for all things bad, is unimaginable, yet totally comical.
While the book may not be “hurt your stomach laughing” good, it is fast paced and sharp, with the typical Sharpe dark humor and story line which takes the viewers to place they did not known they wanted to or could visit. Even though the ideologies and prose is somewhat stuck in 1976, it does have a sense of authenticity to it, making its readers sentimental for the books they probably grew up on.

Crossfire (published in 2010) - A collaboration between Dick Francis and his son, Felix Francis

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.