[In the following review, Shattuck asserts that Francis does not fully explore the emotions and motivations of the villain in his Come to Grief.]

To say that jockey-turned-sleuth Sid Halley solves puzzlers involving horses and horse racing is to repeat what Dick Francis readers know already. To say that he solves them single-handedly is to perpetrate the obvious pun.

Actually, Halley's state-of-prostheses-art left hand comes close to being a co-character in Francis's Halley novels. At some point Sid's amputee status (the hand was lost in a disastrous racing spill) can be expected to become the focus of some character's malicious intent toward Halley-in-whole. A sub-theme of such encounters is people's not uncommon fascination with such physical infirmities. In Sid's dangerous business, morbid interest of this sort can segue to sadism.

Here, the twisted type who's seized by a grim compulsion to wound Halley where he's most vulnerable is a former close friend and fellow jockey who's now an adored media celebrity. What triggers this unsettling episode is Halley's finding and reporting of evidence that Ellis Quint, a genuine charmer, may have perpetrated a series of grotesque mutilations of ponies and horses.

Beleaguered by a pro-Quint public and press—a tabloid paper launches a particularly vicious smear campaign against him—Halley perseveres in pursuing the evidence, even after learning that the mother of the accused has committed suicide, apparently unable to accept what she perceives as Sid's sullying of her innocent son's name.

Steely but not nerveless, Halley suffers both physical danger and guilt for sundering the Quint family, whose patriarch becomes so crazed that he proceeds to stalk his son's accuser with an iron bar, then with a gun.

While dealing with all this, Halley is also striving to give emotional support to another family—that of a woman friend whose nine-year-old daughter is sinking fast from leukemia. Sid's warm rapport with mother and child reminds him poignantly of the failure of his marriage to the beautiful Jenny. Though she has remarried, apparently happily, it's clear that the emotional bond is not completely broken.

One of the delightful perks of a Francis novel is finding oneself diverted by some character's unusual area of expertise. Here, we are introduced to a woman who's a master weaver, known for creating rare, expensive, one-of-a-kind creations from gold and silk. It's a deft Francis touch that one of her museum-worthy pieces, crafted 30 years previously, has ended up wrapped around a pair of shears used to lop off an equine hoof.

Issues of character and morality are also part of the mix. For choosing truth over loyalty to friends, Sid is excoriated. This loss of repute can't help but remind him of earlier, piled-up losses: of the racing career he loved, of his wholeness of body, of the woman he'd married.

Still, as sensitive as Francis seems here to human frailty and to the emotional nuances of his hero, he ends up short-changing readers as to his villain. What impels an otherwise seemingly normal person to commit a series of cruel, bizarre, profitless acts? The explanations contained in the perpetrator's confessional note are unconvincing, and Francis fails to follow through with anything that addresses the psychological riddle. Thus, the book is like an absorbing race with photo-finish in which the central image is too blurred to settle the crucial question.