Blood ties can mean trouble, chains and fatal obligation. Champion steeplechase jockey Kit Fielding, snared by bonds reaching back into history, discovers this to be only too true when he finds he cannot escape from an intensely dangerous situation. Direct, forceful and inventive, he goes to the defence of his twin sister whose husband faces ruin when a spiteful newspaper campaign sets out to wreck his career as a racehorse trainer. Kit’s courage succeeds beyond the point of drawing the fire upon himself so that he in turn becomes a target. Break In is about family relationships, about love, hatred and obsession; it is about the use and abuse of power by the gutter press, who will go to any lengths to get the information they seek and then use that information in any way they choose; and throughout it is about the day-to-day life of a top-flight horseman, for whom race-riding is the most demanding, the most rewarding love of all. Break In is vintage Francis, with pulsating descriptions of the races themselves at which he himself was champion A first-class thriller written by the acknowledged master of his field

When Kit Fielding, champion steeplechase jockey, finds that Princess Casilia, his chief patron, is facing serious trouble, he goes unhesitatingly to her aid. Neither realises that his instinctive support is the first step to a frightening battle involving violent risk, with the honour of the princess’s family as the prize and Kit’s own destruction as the forfeit. Beset by other problems, not least his troubled romance with Danielle, the princess’s niece, Kit knows that while steering through deadly outside dangers and riding at breakneck speed in races, he must also contend with the long-term hatred of his own family’s enemy. Many of the characters from Break In, Dick Francis’s previous bestseller, reappear in Bolt, but the story ends here — and it’s a story which will keep every reader on the very edge of his seat until the last page is turned