Shattered - Dick Francis

When jockey Martin Stukely dies following a fall in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape.

Gerard Logan, half artist, half artisan, is a glass-blower on the verge of widespread acclaim for the originality and ingenuity of his work. He has long been accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass, not to mention in maintaining a glass-making furnace at seldom less than 1,800°F day and night, but now he is suddenly faced with a series of unexpected and terrifying threats, first to his livelihood, then to his courage and, finally, to his life.

Believing the missing videotape to contain priceless information, and wrongly convinced that Logan knows where to find it, a vicious group of villains sets out to extract from him the information he does not have. Logan reckons that to survive he must himself find out the truth. The journey is a thorny one, and the final race to the tape throws more hurdles and more hazards in his way than his dead jockey friend could ever have imagined.

Glass shatters.

Logan doesn’t – but it’s a close-run thing.