[In the following review, Dowell asserts that Francis's Decider "runs smoothly and efficiently to a tidy conclusion."]

When you pick up Decider, the 34th mystery novel written by Dick Francis, there's no question that you've got a well-established, best-selling author in your hands. The pages are creamy and as thick as cardboard, and the story they tell—full of proper folk, ancient manses, and "squashy" furniture—runs smoothly and efficiently to a tidy conclusion.

The narrator is Lee Morris, an architect-builder with "Le Corbusier technology and humanist tendencies." His specialty is turning ruins into elegant, comfortable habitats. He houses his increasingly estranged wife and their six sons on-site in a converted double-decker bus while he builds a dwelling. Then they move in while the new place is on the market.

The old tithe barn on the Surrey-Sussex border that is their current abode feels like home, however, and that is where the manager of Stratton Park racecourse (you knew we'd get around to horses) finds Lee. He has an old, unhappy family connection with the Strattons, who own the park. More important, he owns eight shares of their racecourse. The fate of the park is a bone of contention among the snarling aristocrats. Thus is Lee, hated by the family, drawn reluctantly into their lives, and a plot.

One might almost suspect that Francis, in penning the Stratton family, had in mind another, more loftily titled clan. The Strattons are certainly in as much disarray as the royals; they even have to cope with a surreptitiously taped phone call used by a blackmailer. Ruled by "a delicate-looking, tough-minded old lady with a touch of tycoon" and plagued by scandal hushed up with their millions, the various Strattons are milquetoasts, wife-beaters, and inept swindlers. They might even number among themselves a murderer, who would stoop to blow up the racecourse grandstand with Lee Morris inside.

The Strattons are also rather stiff creations, constantly striding about in more of a lather than the thoroughbreds. Lee has to look out in particular for Keith, whose beastly behavior long ago to his first wife, Lee's mother, has much to do with everything that keeps Decider trotting along.

Francis far more vividly renders Lee's battalion of boys, who dine on such English delicacies as tinned spaghetti on toast and ultimately become the pawns in a grudge match between their father and his archenemy. There are also some lilting odes to horseflesh.

It's all rather soothing, if not very bright, inspiring the same kind of mysterious affection that settles one down to enjoy a dim but satisfying episode of "Murder, She Wrote." As Lee Morris says of a proper gent who refrains from asking personal questions, "I found his inhibitions restful."