Even Money by Dick & Felix Franics
US Cover
Title: Even Money
Author/website: Dick Francis (and Felix)
350 pages
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Publication date: August ‘09
Genre: Mystery
Would I recommend it: I would
UK Cover
Journal notes: I very much enjoyed Even Money by Dick Francis and his son, Felix. It’s a good solid mystery that blindsided me a time or two. Its a bit beyond a cozy mystery but definitely not of the hard-boiled variety. While there is murder, mayhem and mischief its not the bloody, messy, hide-your-eyes kind. Ned manages to maintain his sense of humor in the face of a myriad of personal and work issues. And once the trouble starts it continues to pile up in spades. I may have read Mr. Francis years ago but can’t remember that far back. I know that I’ll be reading more of his work in the future. I did have a some trouble following the shop talk concerning betting and bookmaking but only because I’m not a numbers kind of girl.
A taut crime thriller, features an especially sympathetic hero. Bookmaker Ed Talbot is struggling with his wife’s mental illness, even as technology threatens to give the big bookmaking outfits an insurmountable advantage over his small family business. Soon after a man shows up at Ascot and identifies himself as Ed’s father, Peter, whom Ed believed long dead, a thug demanding money stabs Peter to death. Ed is in for even more shocks when he learns his father was the prime suspect in his mother’s murder—and that Peter’s killing, rather than a random act of violence, may be linked to a mysterious electronic device used in some horse-racing fraud. Ed must juggle his amateur investigations into past and present crimes with his demanding family responsibilities.
(Even Money was provided to me by Anna of Authors on the Web. I was not paid and the book is being shipped to another book blogger. 
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I’ve seen a lot of Dick Francis books around and never read any because I always assumed they were about horses. It looks like I’m partway right. I’ll have to give one of his books a try.
For the most part they are set around horse racing. And the horse racing in Even Money is steeple chasing and not traditional flat track racing as it is here in the States. Even Money is a murder mystery with ties to the racing industry and family secrets.