Product Description

Wine merchant Tony Beach is present at the annual party celebrating the success of the racing season when a runaway horsebox ploughs into the marquee. Witness to the terrible death and destruction Tony believes it is a terrible accident until he becomes involved in the investigation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1744966 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
The narrator of Francis's 26th mystery is Tony Beach, a young widower who fights his grief by keeping busy at his wine shop and by socializing. Eventually he teams up with private detective Gerard McGregor to find the hijackers of several trucks of spirits; the pair then take on a case involving the adulteration of whiskey and wine at a cafe. In rapid order the cafe's steward is brutally murdered, and Tony and Gerard just miss being killed. Tony's severest test occurs at the "stunning climax of what may be judged the best of Francis's bestsellers so far; it's a corker," PW commented.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Booze, not horse-racing, is the primary focus of Francis' latest suspense tale - which, like several of his recent efforts, is rather skimpy on mystery, rather heavy on talk and violence. The novel opens, in fact, with a compelling (but almost entirely irrelevant) disaster scene: a big party at the home of horse-trainer Jack Hawthorn becomes a bloody tragedy when a heavy horse-trailer rolls down a hill and crashes into the party-tent - killing eight, wounding many more. Among the dead: a rather shady winebar-owner named Larry Trent. Among the survivors: wine-merchant Tony Beach, grieving young widower and narrator-hero. And soon Tony is helping the police (and a private-eye chum) to investigate the reported appearance - in local bars and restaurants - of low-price spirits in high-price bottles. Could this rebottling scare be connected to the theft of trailer-fuls of gardenvariety scotch? (That's the private-eye's case.) And what about the gruesome murder - head-wrapping with plaster - of the wine-steward at the late Larry Trent's bar? Or a violent attack on amateur sleuth Tony at his shop? Well, the sleuthing is fairly routine here, largely consisting of following each clue until the bad-guys appear and rough up the good-guys. But the action scenes themselves have most of Francis' visceral zip; the wine-info, though rather too chattily dispensed, covers a lot of diverting ground (label-forging, the perils of wine-tasting, the economics of catering); and Tony, if a bit soppy in his laments for dead wife Emma, develops several genuinely endearing relationships here (none of them romantic) - which helps to make this lesser Francis very likable. . . if not very gripping. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Inside Flap
When a typically perfect party at wine merchant Tony Beach's is brutally crashed, he finds himself caught in the terrifying midst of a mystery that begins with sham scotch and counterfeit claret and escalates to hijacking and murder....

Customer Reviews

You Won't Need Any More to Be a Dick Francis Fan!
PROOF is a terrific story about wine merchant Tony Beach who seems to stumble into one tragic situation after another. He agrees to cater a party for the horseracing elite, and watches as hit men reek havoc on the party. Now he's caught in the middle of a terrifying mystery that begins with counterfeit wine and continues on to murder. He has to dig deep within to continue to have the courage to find out who and why this is happening.

Dick Francis is a great writer of mysteries that always revolve around horseracing life. Most of his stories are based in England and steeple chasing (not the type of horseracing we're used to here in the United States). They are interesting and educational if you know nothing about this sport. Francis does not write tales as intense as some of the American authors do, but they are definitely worth the time to read. My father got me hooked on Dick Francis and his tales of murder and mayhem, and this author will have his books read for many years. They are timeless!

One of Francis' best books
Dick Francis reminds me of a master craftsman of say fine furniture. His quality and style are such that, though all his pieces are different, they nevertheless bear the mark of his unique style and craftsmanship. Once in a while you'll come across a piece that's so unique that at first you're not absolutely sure it's one of his but a very short inspection convinces you that, yes, as odd as this piece may be, it's his.

That's a long way of alluding to the fact that Francis' books tend to be highly formulaic. For the most part you know what you are getting before you even open the cover. The formula consists of a highly independent, iconoclastic, extremely self-reliant protagonist who, for reasons he doesn't fathom, has become the center of a storm that, before everything has played out, will involve him in intrigue, murder and at least one act of horrific violence aimed at him personally. There will be some sort of at least marginal if not central theme of horse racing and a specific theme to the book-precious gems, photography or, in the case of Proof, the wine business.

Proof is a bit of a departure form the formula. The horrific violence is right up front in the form of a ghastly automobile accident. Tony Beach, the protagonist of this accident is present to experience it though he emerges unscathed. The accident does, however, bring him into contact with a private investigator. Their shared experience leads them to get ot know one another and the investigator, realizing Tony has some skills he needs, drags him into one of his cases. Thus Tony is an involved party to, but not the focus of the intrigue of this novel.

Moreover, Tony is not your typical Francis protagonist. Recently widowed, Tony is trying to modulate grief within the context of his own insecurities of not having lived up to the rough outdoorsman-horse fancier image of his very renowned father.

The end result is a Francis novel minus the usual comfort level of the formula. While it can be a risk for an author to diverge from his comfort zone, Francis handles it here with aplomb. Francis is one of the greatest thriller novelists ever. The result is one of his best novels ever. That's not a bad combination!

This is a great read both for the Francis fan as well as the casual suspense-thriller reader.

It's all in the details
A reasonably good mystery that was somewhat tempered by one annoying fact - the author had obviously never used plaster of paris before, or understood how it is to be used. This grated throughout what would have otherwise been a good book - a solid mystery with a bunch of different pieces that converge and fall into place quite nicely at the end. In the end, a small slip-up will probably cause me not to read any more of his books. It's like the author of Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons put it - if you're going to poison someone, make sure you do you homework. This should hold true for any method of murder... Also, he mentioned the Elephant Child and the Limpopo River, and in reading that text, I'm not at all sure it actually had the implications he meant!