Pulse

August 28, 2017
Dr. Christine Rankin, the fraught narrator of bestseller Francis’s moving fourth thriller set in the world of British horse-racing (after 2016’s Triple Crown), suffers from panic attacks and an eating disorder. Her troubles mount with the death of a patient under her care, an unidentified middle-aged man who was found unconscious in a Cheltenham Racecourse restroom and later died while she was attending to an accident victim. After a complaint is filed against Rankin, she’s suspended from work, and suicidal thoughts lead to her confinement in a psychiatric institution. After she’s released and finds work as a doctor at the Cheltenham Racing Festival, she eagerly finds out more about the dead man’s identity and the circumstances of his death. Rankin’s obsession grows after she learns that an injured jockey she’s treating lies to her about recognizing the dead man. Francis devises a subtle, clever scheme for the heart of the mystery, and he excels at making his broken lead credible and sympathetic even as she engages in reckless behavior. Agent: Ed Wilson, Johnson & Alcock.

September 15, 2017
A female lead, ailing but remarkably strong, joins all the males, many with similar profiles, who've helmed the storied father-and-son horse-racing franchise (Triple Crown, 2016, etc.).Emergency room specialist Dr. Chris Rankin has always struggled with depression, anorexia, and panic attacks. So it's no surprise when she feels an attack coming on just as an unconscious man found in a lavatory cubicle at the Cheltenham Racecourse is wheeled into the ER at Cheltenham Hospital; he's suffering from an unidentified malady that's making his heart race at an unsustainable speed. No surprise, but certainly an inconvenience to all hands. Despite her own fluttering heart, Chris requests several tests and then orders a drug that will slow down the man's wildly beating heart. While she's tending to an accident victim, her patient dies, sending her into a spiral of guilt and depression. The cause of death is soon established--a massive cocaine overdose--but not the man's identity or the question of how the drug got into his system. Convinced that he was murdered, Chris, released from a stint in the local psychiatric hospital and struck by injured jockey Dick McGee's reaction to the anonymous victim's photograph while she's tending him as one of the racetrack's medical officers, makes a few casual inquiries. Then she makes a few more. Then she gets the first of several increasingly pointed warnings to quit asking questions. The warnings are seconded by the police, who find her interference annoying, and her husband, engineer Grant Rankin, who's deeply worried about her. Does she quit? She does not, though her first-person account of her increasingly perilous investigation into an elaborate spot-fixing scheme punctiliously telegraphs every nasty development in dire chapter endings that recall the glory days of Nancy Drew.Despite all the heavy-handed foreshadowing, an efficient, steadily absorbing suspenser guaranteed to draw in even fans who can't stand horses.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2017
Felix Francis, who once did research for his father Dick Francis' racing mysteries and then cowrote four of them before the elder Francis' death in 2010, has filled the family stable with more winners, including this one, his seventh solo venture. The title is wonderfully evocative of the story: A UK doctor initially tries to find a dying man's pulse; then investigates the man's death by getting close to the action on a pulse-pounding racecourse; and, through it all, tries to save her own life through her investigation. Chris Rankin, the first-person narrator, serves as senior ER physician in the Cheltenham General Hospital and also works as a doctor at Cheltenham Racecourse. After Dr. Rankin fails to revive a seemingly healthy, well-dressed man brought to the hospital after being discovered unconscious in a racecourse toilet stall, she slips into the depression and anxiety that have always dogged her. She has a desperate need to find out what or who killed the man and plunges herself into the racecourse world, variously trying to talk to jockeys who obviously know something but aren't saying, and sailing around the track in a Land Rover, repairing the bones and sometimes saving the lives of fallen jockeys. The suspense surrounding the man's death, the danger Dr. Rankin finds herself in, and her own desperate mental state all prove riveting throughout. Exciting at every turn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2017

An elegantly dressed man found unconscious at the local racecourse subsequently dies at the hospital, and doctor-in-charge Chris Reynolds is concerned enough about his identity to start asking questions, which nearly gets him killed. New York Times best-selling author Francis gallops back after Triple Crown.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.