Iced

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So I can only award three stars for this, and I'm sad to do so because the novel before this one was so much better.

About half-way through the pace increased somewhat, and I kept going simply to find out what happened in the end. Mortiz with protagonist Miles drawn back into the equestrian world he had walked away from years earlier. This book doesn't have the "on your chair" excitement, but it is well written and keeps you wanting to continue reading. Now he gets his adrenaline rush from riding headfirst down the Cresta Run, a three-quarter-mile Swiss ice chute, reaching speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. There was also a good dose of history which is always a nice addition to fiction because it gives depth and context to the characters and the world they inhabit.He has quit horseracing but still loves extreme sports and is pushing to be the best in tobogganing on the Cresta Run, still going breathtaking speeds with corresponding chances of bodily harm, just like in steeplechasing. The two periods in his life collide when his former boss Jerry Dickinson cajoles him into helping out by taking one of his two horses for a run and saddling up the other before a race. The other thing great literature does is use layered metaphors and the way in which the crime and the preparator came to light was a great play on the 'neck and neck' racing we see so much of in racing. Moritz is also the site of winter horseracing on ice and Jerry Dickinson is there with a couple of his horses.

It's a slow burn book and you're going to learn quite a lot about the problems of addiction and alcoholism along with the attendant mental health issues.Now he gets his adrenaline rush from riding down the Cresta Run, a three-quarter-mile Swiss ice chute, head first, reaching speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. For Miles who was quite tall he was always battling, which meant not eating or drinking before getting weighed, because if he came in pound over he wouldn’t be allowed to race. Great pains are stressed to enumerate the times he has to starve himself to make weight as a jockey. I did like this story but did not like Miles’s self-pity, self-harming(drinking and luging) and general inertia. I enjoyed a stack of used copies of Dick Francis novels when I was 14, surprising myself as I’d never been that interested in horses.