The movie business is … the setting of Wild Horses, Dick Francis's pretty enjoyable new equestrian thriller…. [H]is nice-guy sleuth, Thomas Lyon, is the serious and well-thought-of director of "Unstable Times," a film based on a real-life (in the book) horsey-set mystery. And the eroticism here is not only central to the plot,… but it's also much more—I'm tempted to say—English.

Francis's 33rd mystery—which on a Francis scale of one-to-10 I'd rate an entirely respectable eight—gets off to an intriguing start when Lyon, in Newmarket for filming, hears the death-bed confession of Valentine Clark, an aged black-smith and old family friend. To Lyon's amazement, Clark asks for absolution for killing someone long ago. The details, however, are mystifying.

It soon develops that there's a connection between the confession and the story on which the film is based. Twenty-six years earlier, a young woman named Sonia was found hanged in a stable. In the novel that speculated on the incident, young Sonia's husband is wrongly accused of causing her death and then cleared. The novelist, who is also the screenwriter, is a pretentious artiste who lounges around the set, bemoaning the liberties that are being taken with his screenplay. He's more interested in Sonia's possible fantasy life—centering on wild horses—than on who might have strung her up.

That's all largely academic until Clark's elderly sister is horribly slashed in her house and attempts are made on Lyon's life by someone who wants to stop the film. Solving the crime is no longer a matter of mere art; it's necessary to save the lives of Lyon and maybe others. So the past is dredged up with a vengeance.

Dick Francis, O.B.E., probably has more medals by now than the average field marshal, but he still has a high old time razzing the English upper classes, a race of ninnies throughout his books. In Wild Horses, they're the usual rum lot, and it's the self-made who get the work done. Francis has lived in Florida and the Caribbean off and on in recent years, so he's started in on our more democratic tyrannies, especially the American insistence on eternal youth if not eternal life. A British doctor in Wild Horses asks a Hollywood actor, "Is it true that in America, if you die of old age, it's your fault?" Francis is so good-natured, the reader may miss the real edge in his consistently interesting voice.