PROOF

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.