By Dave Shields,

Three Story Press, $14.95

I've always been a sucker for inspirational sports movies. I still get a little misty when the crowd chants, "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. . . ." And I don't even root for Notre Dame.

Film is typically the perfect medium for these "based on a true story" tales with predictable endings. But sports is one of the rare things that might be tougher to capture in words than in a two-hour movie. And if the story happens to be fiction, it's even tougher.

That's what is impressive about Salt Lake City writer Dave Shields' novel The Tour. It's not a perfect book, but he picked a tough niche - sports novel, fiction, sequel, self-published. That's four strikes, but somehow he pulled it off.

The Tour is a followup to The Race, the continuing tale of Ben Barnes, a domestique - basically a grunt in the lingo of bike-racing - from rural Utah turned Tour de France contender. The Tour picks up exactly where The Race left off, with Ben wearing the famous maillot jaune, or yellow leader's jersey. Shields also wrote the sequel in such a way that reading the first book isn't necessary.

The Tour could have been a predictable story of Barnes' ups and downs and eventual glory riding past the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs-'lysées. Predictability is almost unavoidable in this genre, novel or film. The inspirational ending is the reason these things get produced and written in the first place. It's how the author gets there that makes the difference. Without giving away too much, Shields does this one better by avoiding a cliché ending without compromising the story.

Even with sometimes-clunky dialogue and odd metaphors, Shields kept me wanting to see how Barnes avoids the temptation of performance-enhancers, staves off the orders of his team owner and deals with a failing relationship.

While it's fiction, the book still takes readers through the Tour de France much the same way as the real race. Shields spent time at last year's Tour for the sequel. And it paid dividends in the descriptions of the towns and French countryside.

The other difference from the first book is that the main characters are more flawed and hence more real. Barnes isn't as squeaky clean - nor is his love interest, Brigette LeBlanc.

If there's a complaint, it's with some of the dialogue, which sometimes is used to explain too much when the narrator could have handled it more clearly. Case in point: the tiresome explanation of cheating in cycling among Ben, Brigette and his friends from Utah, Coach and Thelma.

But the complaints are few. It's a simple tale - overcoming adversity to achieve great results through hard work, doing the right thing and some typical sporty motivational tricks.

It's easy is to get wrapped up in the fate of this fictional rider, and readers will likely learn something about the Eurocentric sport. But above all, Shields uses The Tour to comment on the drug-plagued sport he loves so much without preaching.