Second Wind

A friend had praised Dick Francis for years, finally handed me "Forfeit," which I enjoyed and reviewed (qv).Afterwards, another very intelligent friend thinks so highly of Dick Francis that, unbidden, he loaned me his entire Francis library!

TV weather man, Perry Stuart, accepts the offer of a colleague to fly into the eye of a hurricane, off the coast of Miami, to measure its diameter and to study its effects. The pilot loses control of the plane under these conditions and, when the plane goes down, Perry is marooned on a tiny island in the Caribbean from which all the inhabitants have been evacuated.

I originally started reading Dick Francis' mysteries because of the connection to the horse world. While Second Wind is very well written, there was practically no connection to horses whatsoever.