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*** “Bolt”

By Dick Francis. Read by Nigel Havers. Listen for Pleasure (two cassettes).

Mysteries are particularly hard to slim down for audio because their plots tend to be so heavily encrusted with incident and detail. Even in this expert pruning of ex-jockey Dick Francis’ thriller about a race course family feud, there are moments of unintentional bafflement (“Where did that come from?”). But Jockey Kit Fielding, his sister, their jeopardies and, as always, Francis’ skill at conveying the steeplechase experience make for a suspenseful yarn, pleasingly read by Nigel Havers, lately seen as the doctor in “Empire of the Sun.”