Dick Francis teamed up with his youngest son, Felix, to write Dead Heat, 2007's installment in the long-running series of horse-race-industy thrillers by the former jump-jockey champion from England. It's a savvy bit of marketing: have Felix co-author a couple of books to get us used to his name on the cover, then fade old dad out and leave it to Felix to continue to churn out a book a year with no loss in readership nor profit.

And I was determined not to fall for it.

I love the first 40 or so novels in the series, when ol' Dick's name was alone on the cover. So I wasn't about to take the marketing ploy lying down. I read Dead Heat with every intention of hating it, of finding every little fault and every little divergence from dad's original formula and holding young Felix to account for it.

And it worked for a while. The book starts off slowly, with a lot of long, clumsy sentences and banal dialogue. Even the plot seems to lack flavour at the outset — Max Moreton, a gourmet chef with a successful restaurant on the outskirts of Newmarket, is thrown for a loop when a catering job goes horribly wrong and dozens of his clients contract serious food poisoning. Big deal. So what? Who cares!

But then a bomb blows up a part of the grandstand at the Newmarket track, blasting to bloody bits the luncheon party that Moreton is in the process of feeding, and Moreton is swept up in a spellbinding tale of violence and villainy. From that point on, it's pure Francis (Dick or Felix, it doesn't seem to matter), with likable characters, high tension and galloping action that carries you through the 400 pages it takes to get you to the climax.

Just as in the best of Francis, there is also a love story and, as usual, it's told with a happy innocence and joie de vivre that someone like me, who loves a good romcom, can't help but enjoy it.

We may never know how much of this book is Dick and how much is Felix but it certainly is a fine addition to the Dick-Francis line of thoroughbred mysteries. And it's a nice touch that the title, Dead Heat, harkens quietly back to the title of the book that started it all for Dick Francis, Dead Cert. It's a nice way to launch Felix's career as a writer.

Tags: Dick Francis, Felix Francis, Dead Heat