Dick Francis's Bloodline (A Dick Francis Novel)

Good, well-written and plotted, interesting storyline, but doesn't have his father's touch in making his protagonist likeable.

BLOODLINE was another engaging mystery by Felix Francis who is continuing his father's legacy for heart-pounding mysteries. Mark Shillingford is a race caller and television presenter. His twin sister is a champion flat racing jockey. When she, seemingly, commits suicide, Mark needs to know why. Investigating will lead him into danger and bring out strengths he didn't know he had.Mark and Clare are the youngest of their family and have a contentious relationship with their father. Neither of them chose to follow his path to university and a city career. Both wanted to be jockeys but Mark grew to be too big and too heavy. He drifted into race calling and television reporting and has been a great success. He is not an argumentative person and is rather indecisive. He presents the picture of being very laid back. He drifted into a relationship with a married woman and, although he is 31, he still lives in the apartment he and Clare moved to when they left home at seventeen.His sister's death galvanized him and his investigation leads to discoveries of race fixing, blackmail and murder. Along the way his is strangled near to death and the near victim of a hit-and-run but neither cause him to back off in his investigation.I really like Mark as a main character. His determination to find out what really happened to his sister Clare changes him and his family. I liked his dogged persistence as he unraveled the mysteries surrounding his sister.I also really like that all of these mysteries shed light on some field of endeavor. It was interesting to find out all about the ins and outs of doing live television coverage of horse racing.Fans of mysteries can't do wrong with Dick or Felix Francis.

I have read all of the Dick Francis novels and I have retained all of them that are exceptional enough to reread more than five times. This author is above Field Of Thirteen and almost as good as Twice Shy.Writing is hard work and this author needs to do a few more hours of editing, or marry an editor/ghostwriter.

Last time, in "Gamble," Felix Francis's first go-it-alone novel since his father's death, the second son of the the late Queen Mother's former jockey spread his wings a bit and ventured beyond horseracing to also include and encompass the worlds of dodgy accounting and internet gambling. Which I greatly enjoyed. And I hope he'll be doing more of that. But this time, it's all back to the world of horseracing."Bloodline's" hero, Mark Shillingford, is a TV race commentator who has just witnessed his twin sister, Clare, a jockey, lose a race on purpose. Within hours of his confronting her on this, she'll be found dead on the sidewalk under a London hotel balcony. Accident? Murder? Suicide? What was it? Later, while going through her things, Mark discovers that Clare had been being blackmailed. And, in short order, he'll find that she wasn't the only one. The plot thickens. And danger lurks.I think Felix Francis is a terrific mystery writer. And I really liked this one. But I almost knocked this 5-star novel down to a 4-star rating because the ending caught me off guard and I didn't think Felix had given readers a fair shot at figuring out the "who" in this whodunit. But just to make sure, I paged through the book for another look and saw that the clues were there. Guess I'd just let him divert my attention elsewhere. Looking forward to what comes next.

I always enjoy the novels by Dick Francis and his son Felix. Always twists and turns and very interesting. I can never put them down and have read them all 3 or 5 times.

I agree with some of the more critical comments that have been posted, especially with respect to excessive, repetitive detail and poorly developed and/or seemingly unconnected storylines. These are the errors of a competent researcher (the role Felix Francis played in support of many of his father's books) who has not yet paid sufficient attention to character development and plot (his father's main strengths). Unless he learns to tell more interesting and suspenseful stories, he certainly will lose me as a reader. (And he should either learn to write a convincing sex scene or leave such interludes to the reader's imagination!)And yet -- this book wasn't a total dud. Parts of it, especially the beginning section leading up to the death of the protagonist's sister and the denouement, were relatively taut and suspenseful. As a whole, the book was perhaps as good as the five weakest of Dick Francis's novels -- no better, but no worse. This suggests to me that Felix needs simply to put more hard work into his books; this one, frankly, was sloppy and lazy.One more observation. Is anyone else annoyed by posthumous titles such as "Dick Francis's this," or "Robert B. Parker's that?" I realize that there has to be acknowledgement of the master by the author who inherits the franchise, but something more modest would suffice. This was Felix Francis's book, and his name should have appeared at the top of the cover.

I love listening to audio books

Like his books, the delivery was fast, value great, book in condition described. Couldn't be much better.

Difficult to say whether I prefer the 'old' Francis thrillers or the more recent ones. Totally irrelevant, the complaint made by some people that he didn't write them all alone (apparently he & his wife wrote them together). In each book there is a different background, though almost always with racing hints and links, and the villain gets his come-uppance and the 'goodies' triumph in varying degrees. I keep a collection of his books and re-read them from time to time, when I need an evening of 'escapism' - less fattening than chocolate!

双子の姉が自殺する。他殺にちがいないとマークは真相を究明する。先日読んだthe cuckoo’s callingと似通った設定である。出版はこちらの方が早いが。Felix Francisは父親のDFよりも英語がわかりやすく読みやすい。同じ競馬を題材にしながら親子で違うものだと思う。若干、冗長になる所はあるが、楽しめる一冊である。犯人が想像もしない人物であるということが、最後にわかる。