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Based on the thriller of the same name by Dick Francis, Twice Shy sees you in the role of physicist Jonathan Derry. You come into possession of a set of cassette tapes. What they are or what they are for is up to you to find out. What you do know is that certain people will kill for the information contained on them.

The game begins in your house (which does not appear to have been cleaned for months judging from some of the descriptions). Your wife takes a phone call and rushes off muttering something about friends in Norwich. Collecting what you need from the house, you set off to follow your own business in your battered Peugeot. You drive around, exploring the area when the first major problem arises. You run out of petrol.

Never mind, a friendly AA man gives you a tow - proving that you can pay him of course and if you have some money left, you can even buy some petrol and continue the game.

Like many other motorists before you, you get lost on an M25 interchange and if you are not careful, you will end up driving the wrong way and crash! More money for repairs.

Eventually, you make your way to East Anglia an meet some more people and the knack is to find out what information they know, each one giving you a few extra bits of the puzzle.

Like all Dick Francis books, Twice Shy has a racing background and your constant need for more money means that it is only natural that you should end up at the races. Here, you can opt to try and win some more by loading the racing game on side two of the tape. This game can be played either as part of the adventure or as a standalone game and features the usual study the form, make your bet, watch the race and (hopefully) collect your winnings format.

The game itself looks very colourful, highly reminiscent in style to Terrors Of Trantoss which is hardly surprising seeing that both games were written by RamJam using the same system. My main moan is that the parser is a little weak and you often get the response OK when in fact what you wanted to happen has not actually occurred.

For example, if you open the bottle of pills, the pills spill out all over the floor. If you pick them up and try to 'put pills in bottle', the reply is 'OK' but all you have done is drop them. Although the parser seems to accept reasonably complex commands, it does in fact reduce them to traditional verb-noun inputs.

The game follows the plot of the book quite closely and the blurb says that it helps to have read Twice Shy first. In that case, I think that Mosaic missed a trick by not bundling the game with the book. Even if, like me, you have not read it, the game is still enjoyable to play. You just have to think a little bit harder, that's all.