Decider by Dick Francis

24Jun. Kindle.

I read a pile of excellent mysteries and decided it was time to treat myself to another Dick Francis. I am trying to ration them. All of those others are well-written (well, most of them were) and well-crafted and none of them could begin to compare to "the next Dick Francis."

Lee Morris is a builder. He searches out "ruins" and restores/converts them. His newly completed project was a decrepit barn and is now a uniquely liveable house which suits his family down to the ground (so to speak). Unfortunately, his working pattern has always been to complete a project, sell it, and find another ruin to fix. This time his family has dug in their collective heels (all fourteen of them - heels, that is, if you count the baby - wife and six sons, counting the baby), and are demanding to stay put rather than move on to another wreck to live in - another round of leaking roofs and collapsing walls.

At this point, a representative of his unfamily walks in. Francis has presented his readers with some unusual families before, but this time he has outdone himself. In the near view, Morris and his wife have taken "staying together for the kids" to a whole new level. In the long view, the "family" in question is not his family by blood at all. His mother escaped with her life from a brutally abusive husband, and part of her settlement was eight shares in the Stratton family race course. The patriarch of the clan has died and the family is engaged in a vicious battle over the fate of the race course - one group wants to maintain the tradition, and the other to sell out to a developer for as much as they can get.

These people are individually and collectively as nasty as any bunch Francis has ever put on paper, definitely a clan that needs to die out. Although a couple of them eventually turn out to be somewhat human.

Morris is intrigued by the issue at least in part because the structures of the race course badly need updating - and he was, after all, looking for a new ruin. This one ends up more of a ruin than he anticipated, but in the manner of all Dick Francis heroes, he gets things done.