It’s available on Amazon UK and Amazon.com and will be released on all other outlets on June 1st (the delay is due to contractual obligations with Amazon).

Happy reading.

Richard & Joe

A print version should be ready for sale on Amazon by the end of April.

Happy reading!

Richard and Joe

Meeting the Queen Mum, a great racing fan

Update: Running Scared has now been published.

Judy Gourdji kindly left a comment asking about the two previously published titles we haven’t yet converted to e-books – Running Scared and The Third Degree.

We’re rewriting Running Scared at the moment. We’ll then do the same for The Third Degree. We did quite substantial rewrites on all the books (nothing ever looks as good after a few years, and we always think we can improve them).

Running Scared should be ready by the end of March at latest and, hopefully, The Third Degree by mid-June. We then have a brand new one to finish and publish in the autumn – Dead Ringer – and with some luck, will get another brand new one out for Christmas…that’s the optimistic outlook at the moment with spring around the corner.

Comments, suggestions, feedback are always welcome. We now have around 100 reviews on Amazon. Some raise points we’ve been tempted to respond to, by way of clarification, but we take the view that readers leave reviews for other readers, not for authors. Anyway, reviews of any kind are hard to come by these days and we’re most grateful to those who take the time to write them.

Best wishes

Richard & Joe

After 6 hours Warned Off had hit number 1 on Amazon.com’s Top 100 Mystery & Thrillers, and number 4 in the Top 100 of all books.

We thank everyone who has downloaded Warned Off and helped it get such prominence.

You can get it free until midnight on January 5th on the following links:

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

This story finds our main character Eddie Malloy teaming up with a man we introduced in For Your Sins, Frankie Houlihan. It’s an idea we wanted to try and it finds Eddie pursuing life after giving up riding.  We plan to write many more Eddie Malloy adventures which will see him at much earlier points in life than this one does. But we wanted to find out how he and Frankie would gel. If feedback is good, there will be more books featuring the pair.

Eddie has been out of racing for a few years, but his hunger for risk and adventure has cost him dearly. His heroics in the teeth of a savage storm on Everest win him the chance to gatecrash the world of British racing and settle some old long-festering sores.

Eddie’s billionaire boss Vaughn Keelor has big plans and Eddie is under pressure to deliver them. He can’t face failure in racing yet again. But somebody is determined to force him out for good, somebody who is ready to kill him.

Eddie’s boss wants the racing authorities to protect Malloy and ex-priest Frankie Houlihan is appointed to shadow him. The two men have much in common and become great friends. But Frankie doubts his ability to protect Eddie and when a mystery attacker stalks them both Frankie faces life or death decisions. He has the support of a new woman, a powerful force in her own right, but can they save Eddie Malloy, his sanity and his life?

Between the .com and .UK sites, we’ve accumulated 34 reviews –  sixteen 5* and seventeen 4*, one 3*. We are hugely grateful to those readers who took the time to review books. Time is precious for many people these days, especially avid readers.  So to the following, we offer a huge

For a bigger and clearer picture of all reviews, our Amazon.com page is here  and our UK page is here.

The Amazon.com link for the book is here and you can download a five-chapter excerpt here

Here’s the ‘blurb’ for For Your Sins:

Frankie Houlihan is a young priest distracted from his vocation by just one thing – horseracing. Standing beside the most dangerous steeplechase fence at Cheltenham, Frankie hurries to help a fallen jockey, Kathy Spencer. Their meeting was to change many lives forever.

Gerry Monroe, is a bitter ex-jockey who has feigned injury to cover his fear of riding. His fierce ambition to ‘be someone’ mutates into a psychotic obsession to bring misery to those who have succeeded where he failed.

Kelly Corell is a Dublin gangster with a reputation for violence and an idea that will net him millions and devastate the world of horseracing. And Peter Culling is a dying vet who wants to live forever . . . Culling doesn’t care who is sacrificed to help finance his wild scheme.

Frankie Houlihan finds himself confronting the real world and the maelstrom of terror wrought by Monroe, Corell and Culling. Will he be sucked in and destroyed, or can he battle through and finally find peace?

Warned Off is doing pretty well on sales . . .

. . . and in July everyone who’s bought Warned Off appears to have bought Hunted at the same time – we’ve sold exactly the same number of each.

Nora Ephron

Do you ever get annoyed with yourself when you take a real shine to someone only after reading their obituary? Nora Ephron, who died on Tuesday aged 71, of pneumonia, brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, is the latest on my ‘wish I’d known her’ list.

Nora was an all-round writer: novels, screenplays, essays, blogs, journalism, and she found time to be a director too – You’ve Got Mail anyone? Her smash hit in the movie world (her first screenplay, co-written with her friend Alice Arlen, was Silkwood) was Sleepless in Seattle.

The four Ephron children (all girls) were writers. Nora was the eldest. She and her siblings would be much loved by those who claim writers are born, not made. Their parents, Henry and Phoebe (nee Wolkind) wrote screenplays, among them Carousel and there’s No Business Like Showbusiness.

Nora had a bestseller with Heartburn, a novel based on the breakup of her marriage to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. You know you’re a writer when the ‘That’s great copy!’ demon in your soul shunts your suffering self into a siding to lie alone while it hammers out the story.

Success, admiration, money, Manhattan . . . it would have been understandable had Nora taken on at least a few airs and graces but, as the New York Times reports:

All her articles were characterized by humor and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline. (Many of her articles were assembled in the collections “Wallflower at the Orgy,” “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”)

Ms. Ephron made as much fun of herself as of anyone else. She was labeled a practitioner of the New Journalism, with its embrace of novelistic devices in the name of reaching a deeper truth, but she always denied the connection. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is,” she once wrote. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.”

I’m sorry to say that the first article of Nora’s I read was this one about her time as an intern in JFK’s White House. It’s a lovely piece and it made me wish I’d read her stuff sooner. It made me wish I’d known her.

The full NYT piece is well worth reading.

Rest in peace Nora. You’ve now got male (well this male, at least)

Joe McNally

I’m grateful to David Shankbone for permission to use the picture under the Wikimedia Commons licence

Richard was an altruistic kidney donor in January. More details of the books here.

Thanks

Richard and Joe

Hunted

‘It’s a neat plot, very well developed … and the climax is as good as anything Francis has come up with.’  Racing Post

‘If it’s fiction you’re after, the team of Richard Pitman and Joe McNally have struck again with another racing-based thriller mystery.’  The Sporting Life

‘There is plenty of well-written racing action and weighing-room atmosphere in which Richard Pitman’s expertise as a former top jockey shines through and the tension, so important in a thriller, is kept going from start to finish. Thoroughly recommended.’  Horse & Hound 

Warned Off

‘It’s a racing certainty that Warned Off will offer a challenge to Dick Francis. It’s packed with authentic dialogue and characters.’  Today

‘A very professional racing thriller … lots of rough stuff, plenty of racing background and action all mixed up with a love interest combine to provide a fast-moving story.’  Publishing News

‘The plot is from the racing stockpot … fast and violent.’  The Times

Running Scared

‘Brings the racing scene so vividly to life … racy in both the equine and the literary sense.’  Racing Post