Even at Its Unlikeliest, Action Gallops Along in Francis’ Latest

I’ve got to admit it. Dick Francis is a genius. I can find no other explanation for why, given the preposterous elements of “Second Wind” (Putnam, $24.95, 293 pages), his 40th novel, I woke up in the middle of the night worried about the protagonist, Perry Stuart.

It would be difficult to come up with a less compelling profession for a sleuth: Stuart is a physicist turned meteorologist for the BBC. Make that a famous meteorologist, for he notes: “From breakfast to midnight our voices sounded familiar and our faces smiled or frowned into millions of homes until we could go nowhere at all without recognition.”

“We” includes Kris Ironside, a fellow forecaster who is a manic depressive and an amateur pilot. (Great combination, don’t you think?)

While Perry ostensibly is “interpreting the invisible swings and buffets of global air,” this is a Francis novel, and Francis was once the queen mother’s jockey, so it’s a sure bet he’s going to wind up at a racetrack. How the author gets him there is either inspired or ludicrous: Famous forecasters attract subsections of society whose fates depend on the weather. Perry’s acolytes are racehorse trainers seeking perfect underfoot conditions for their speedy hopefuls.

Invited to lunch by Newmarket’s horse-racing set, the two weathermen fly down in Kris’ Piper Cherokee. There they meet Robin Darcy, a rich Floridian who was born clever. Learning that Kris yearns to fly through the eye of a Caribbean hurricane, Darcy offers to fund the expedition and Perry decides to tag along as navigator.

But before they take off from Grand Cayman, Perry discovers a hidden agenda that involves a tiny island, an international political conspiracy, gun-toting socialites, plane crashes, absurd action sequences, the right girl, and of course, an ailing filly. How Francis stir-fries all these ingredients into a satisfying feast is perhaps the biggest mystery.

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There’s a curious author’s note at the beginning of “O Is for Outlaw” (Henry Holt, $26, 318 pages) that explains that Kinsey Millhone, heroine of Sue Grafton’s bestselling alphabet series, is caught in a time warp and is working in 1986, without access to cell phones, the Internet or other high-tech equipment. Without this information, I might have speculated about Kinsey’s lack of e-mail, much as I wonder about her dearth of dresses, but I would have missed a remarkably inventive literary tactic.

Grafton omits most time-related references from her novels--songs, television shows, social happenings, politics. The absence of a shared cultural bond with the reader gives Kinsey a larger-than-life quality, much the way photographers use a narrow depth of field to achieve a sharply focused subject with the background a blur.

In her latest escapade, Kinsey receives a call from a Teddy Rich, a storage space scavenger who buys the contents of abandoned units sight unseen. He comes upon memorabilia with Kinsey’s name, high school diploma, old report cards, class pictures, pink-bead baby bracelet, and wants to sell them back to her for $30. “The fact was, I had so little in the way of personal keepsakes that any addition would be treasured,” Kinsey notes wistfully.

Her things turned up in a space rented by Mickey Magruder, Kinsey’s heretofore nameless first ex-husband. She left Mickey because he had violated her sense of honor, which is really saying something because rather than pay Rich an extra $20 to find out where the space was located, Kinsey breaks into his house. We learn that Mickey was once a suspect in the death of a transient.

He asked Kinsey to give him an alibi, and she refused. Among the memorabilia she buys back from Rich, she finds a sealed letter from 1972 containing evidence that Mickey was innocent. Just as Kinsey is having second thoughts about him, she learns that Mickey has been shot in Los Angeles and is in a coma. Eager to come to terms with her past, she investigates.

More melancholy than other novels in the series, the pace is labored and the ending feels forced. (I believe there should be a moratorium on plot twists involving Vietnam or Nazis.) Still, longtime fans will revel in the secretive Kinsey’s trip down memory lane. And her caustic sense of humor is unrivaled. Of her ex she notes, “He kept his assets liquid. . . . He was probably happiest making depositsto the Curtain Rod Savings and Loan.”

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Attention Anne Perry fans. Surly private investigator William Monk is back on the job in “The Twisted Root” (Ballantine Books, $25, 352 pages) after his long-awaited marriage to the feisty nurse Hester Latterly. Monk is in a good mood, which dulls his enthusiasm for his new case. “There’s nothing I can find that would bring anything but tragedy to them,” he laments to Hester, who is trying to juggle hospital reform, missing morphine and dinner preparations.

The case involves a young widow, Miriam Gardiner, soon to be remarried, who attends a party at her future in-laws’ house and suddenly flees. At the behest of her distraught fiance, Monk locates the coach she left in and, unfortunately, the body of the coachman, who has been hit on the head with something heavy.

The book has more Victorian details than a Renovation Hardware catalog, and the courtroom drama featuring the aristocratic barrister Oliver Rathbone is entertaining. Unfortunately, the shocking ending loses much of its power because of a silly error in mathematics.