Longshot/The Women in His Life/Crackdown/Something to Hide [antikvár]

John Kendall is broke; hungry and cold. When the struggling novelist is forced out of his tiny attic room one icy February morning, he's not quite sure what he'll do to make ends meet.On an impulse, John accepts an offer to write the biography of a champion racehorse trainer. But the deeper John digs into the man's past, the closer he comes to uncovering a gruesome truth. And someone is determined that this truth will never come to light.For John Kendall, the greatest struggle is about to begin."Dick Francis is now indubitably one of the superstars among mystery-thriller writers."Los Angeles Times Book ReviewChapter 1I accepted a commission that had been turned down by four other writers, but I was hungry at the time.Although starving in a garret had seemed a feasible enough plan a year earlier, the present realities of existence under the frozen eaves of a friend's aunt's house, in Chiswick, in a snowy January were such that without enough income to keep well fed and warm, I was a knockover for a risky decision.My state, of course, was my own fault. I could easily have gone out looking for paid employment. I didn't have to sit shivering in a ski suit, biting the end of a pencil, unsure of my ability and of the illuminations crashing about in my head.The spartan discomfort was not, either, a self-pitying morass of abject failure but more the arctic doldrums between the recent acceptance of my first novel for publication and the distant date of its launch into literary orbit. This was the downside after the heady receipt of the first advance payment and its division into past debts, present expenses and six months' future rent.Give it two years, I'd thought, kissing farewell to the security of a salary: if I can't get published in two years, I'll admit that the compulsion to write fiction is fool's gold. Tossing away the paychecks had been a fairly desperate step, but I'd tried writing before work and after, in trains and at weekends, and had pro-