SOURCE: "Mysteries," in The Washington Post Book World, September 18, 1994, p. X10.

In the following excerpt, Lipez calls Francis's Wild Horses "pretty enjoyable."

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...