COMEBACK

After a superfluous opening episode in Miami, Francis begins his 30th thriller by packing his Foreign Service hero Peter Darwin back to Cheltenham, where Peter spent his own early years, to solve the riddle of who burned down the office of his new friend Ken McClure's veterinary practice, who was the dead man found inside, and why and how so many of the horses that Ken has recently attended have died on (or awfully near) the operating table. Good questions, all of them—their mystery intensified by an unusually nasty second murder—and Peter is a likable detective (plus an engaging suitor of a bishop's daughter), but not a patch on Francis's brooding early heroes. The solution, which Peter helps construct from his own Cheltenham memories, is, like the whole exercise, a little pro forma, but the bestselling author's touch with a story is as sure as ever, and there's more about horses (though dead rather than quick) than in any Francis in years.