True to Character

...In Bolt Kit even avoids the obligatory trap into which detectives almost invariably walk with incredible stupidity...

...And there is the tale of the child on the way to the Orient with his mother and new sibling...

...Let Mother Benedicta remove the dagger...

...He has reason to think he is losing his fiancée, Danielle, an intelligent and charming American newscaster, to a prince...

...Death Drop, Gill's first novel, shows a humanly mixed group of people running a boys' school with a combination of bumbling negligence and blind devotion to tradition that places the students at risk from the unhappiest one, whose desperation drives him to kill...

...A little more shadowy than making a salesman take back the rotten car he'd conned her into buying...

...This was a lot different from beating up a boy who pinched her bottom twice at school...

...Gill doesn't usually manipulate her characters arbitrarily, and in Nursery Crimes the motivations up to that point could be defended...

...For professional misconduct with a patient...

...Gill, too, knows how to use attractive characters in working out her plots...

...the urgencies of fighting the corrupt and powerful...

...The baby cries, the mother says in laughing exasperation, "I'd like to throw you out the porthole...

...The wonder is that a hero with all these qualities can be bearable...

...But the wrong person dies, leaving Zanny so free from suspicion that this time her parents don't have to coach her in what lies to tell " the good, kind policeman...

...Yet the two have one important skill in common, essential for literature and painfully rare in the detective story: they can be true to their characters...

...his exciting races, with skullduggery in the background...

...These juvenile murders put me off, seeming rather implausible...

...When the idea of putting Zanny and Dolly into a convent came up, Zanny's father "didn't give a damn one way or another...

...Zanny's excuse is more understandable...

...How to deal with this dilemma...

...To atone for hitting four-yearold Willie she is forced to give him her stuffed monkey...

...What's so jolly about death...

...Somehow I expected the dénouement to do more than leave despair...

...The wit is undeniable—even comedy, particularly in the conversations among the children, the misunderstandings as Zanny attempts to confess...

...While Zanny had been busy murdering...

...Instead of being brutally beaten himself, he saves his rival from death in a remarkably original scene of speedy action that requires the quick good will of many people...

...Bereft, she retrieves it by drowning Willie in the fish pond...

...To Zanny's arriving father the love affair suddenly becomes an asset...

...Kit's rapport with Kinley (a great hope for the Grand National until he is basely slain by a family enemy) "had deepened in three succeeding outings so that by February he seemed to know in advance what I wanted him to do, as I knew what he wanted to do before he did it...

...The princess and her frail husband are threatened by a sinister business partner whose deadly determination to turn them by force into munition makers imperils not only family honor but lives...

...But the real secret, I'm convinced, is the character of the jockey narrator...

...This ending, though its surprise may please traditional fans, is in some ways regrettable...

...Yet in addition, I think, the author is trying to show how a child like Zanny could happen...

...If you think it's such fun, she may be saying, let me tell you how it really is...

...Frustration "was sending me hurtling over the fences without prudence, recklessly embracing peril like a drug to blot out rejection...

...And especially, how can it happen when the story is told in the first person...

...Even the young Jesus, according to one of the apocryphal gospels, was seen to pause in his play—making clay pigeons fly—and slay a small neighbor who had "vexed him with a word...

...he had been busy dropping bombs on Cologne...

...The renewal of Zanny's urge to kill comes because she again feels that she is being robbed of something precious, this time the man who has roused her first surge of adolescent passion...

...The first hurdle left me gasping...

...In her latest, Nursery Crimes, little Zanny Moncrief at age six has killed twice, decisively...

...It was unlikely that Zanny would covet Dolly's rosary beads...

...Clues to his appeal can come through descriptions of other characters as well...

...But the more genuine this doctor's pain, the more believable the sympathy and help of his friends and associates, the less of a "solution" it is to discover who committed the crime...

...If she did—then tough...

...The protagonist of The Twelfth Juror finds himself illegally in a position to help decide the fate of a defendant—illegally because he has given refuge in his house to the defendant's daughter, on the run to escape testifying...

...Still, these true aristocrats may be an endangered species...

...Gill's ironic tone edges so close to cynicism that her message may be missed...

...Then, after what matches the Freudian sexual latency period, she strikes again at age 14, more than making up for the interlude...

...One must go back to her earlier books, however, to discover this...

...His seven-year-old sister Dolly demands another precious possession in return for silence, making it necessary to do away with her...

...Tolliston at the moment of the first murder...

...Maybe we should simply resign ourselves to sadness as a corollary...

...The previous novel Break In has Kit reflecting during a fast car ride with his twin sister Holly: "I thought she had more faith in my ability to fix things than I had my self...

...No one gets anywhere without it...

...Of course, that may be Gill's intention in all her mysteries...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" This may seem an odd coupling— two novels so far apart on the mystery spectrum...

...One is the 26th book by a former steeplechase jockey whose switch from riding to writing has rewarded him with even more sensational wins...

...Zanny's mother was in bed with Dr...

...The result was racing at its sublime best, an unexplainable synthesis at a primitive level and undoubtedly a shared joy...

...and by the end I reckoned we'd stolen twenty lengths in the air...

...Kinley's owner is a princess, who comports herself with the grace and incorruptibility Francis apparently thinks typical of the high-born...

...For she can make you know her characters as people, sentient and vulnerable, and share their efforts to deal with deep trouble...

...Francis is, for one thing, a master of offhandedness...

...But he is far more...

...It seems we can't have it both ways...

...It's nice to be nice,' our grandmother had said often enough to Holly and me, bringing us up, and 'hate curdles your brains.'" A hero must also be daring...

...If Tolliston shops Zanny at the inquest, I'll shop him...

...The old trainer Wykeham, whose horses Kit rides, was in his youth "a powerhouse on legs with the joy of life pumping through his veins...

...In Suspect, a surgeon has just learned to know and love his daughter when her body is found, the latest of a series of young women raped and strangled in the park...

...And in her earlier books she shows what it does to lives you care about...

...On the opening page of Bolt we see Kit facing the first of the three struggles ahead of him...

...At the first opportunity the ever-helpful fouryear-old obliges...

...Relish the struggle, that's the way.'" Puzzling over the way his visiting Palm Beach aunt Beatrice could let herself be tempted into treachery, Kit "wondered whether a putative million dollars was worth an unquiet mind...

...Contrary to convention, the murder comes in the dénouement...

...He sees his wife as "maturing with the speed of a tropical plant in a rain forest...

...Joyoflife,' he'd said to me several times, 'that's what 1 have...

...Unless, that is, we choose the obvious option: to give up reading "novels of suspense...

...So casually does he show what kind of brother he has been and what early-budding skills he can bring to a truly serious crisis in her life...

...Two more problems arrive in short order—other people's dangers, even more dangerous to the one who intervenes—but Kit tackles them with all his wit and audacity...

...Gill and Francis create characters who engage us to the end...

...Nevertheless, it is there...

...The "stunner ending" struck me as a concession to detective story standards...

...Must we settle for puppets we don't have to worry about, as in Agatha Christie...

...Then I remembered a friend of mine who at age five thrust a pin deep into the soft spot of her unwelcome baby brother's head...

...Reasons are easy to find: the glamour of his scenes, with their high-bred horses and owners...

...Each book leaves a warm sense of comfort, like the refreshed awareness of a reliable friend...

...That he should win such a following suggests a great hunger for a hero...

...To her their plan is fail-safe: "The convent was neutral ground...

...Nursery Crimes has been called by one reviewer "a wickedly witty, stylish story," and was praised by another as "bouncy" and "jolly...

...That's what you have...

...The other is the fourth by a woman who after a career in teaching and—of all things—chiropody, is only belatedly winning her fans...

...With her father off in World War II, she suddenly has to share her mother's attention—fleeting at best—with two evacuee children from the slums of London...

...Nonetheless, it does demonstrate the freedom from formula that Francis has earned...

...In a period of lax conscience and shady values, Kit Fielding has the old virtues—firm principles, courage, modesty, persistence, integrity, endurance, loyalty, patience, thoughtfulness, consideration, and just plain goodness...

...How can this happen...

...To thousands of readers the annual Dick Francis novel is a more welcome sign of spring than any blossom you could name...