His parents and elder sisters expect Henry to do the right thing and marry some wealthy heiress who will bail out the family, but Henry wants no part of it and constantly avoids the young women that his mother keeps throwing at him.

Before long he finds himself tangled up in a scandal that could put his very life in danger, and finds that those he believed to be his allies are aiming to end his life before the plane he's on ever hits the ground. The first bit is racy, fun and exciting, with a vivid description of characters and 1960s London office surroundings.Henry immediately takes to his glittering new world and, when he meets the glamorous Gabriella in Italy, is sure he’s hit the good life. Before long, Henry will discover that something very odd is going on in the horse transport business, and his discovery could well cost him his life. In May of this year we finished Dead Cert and we both enjoyed it, but I think we both enjoyed this one more.

As well as counting birds for an hour and reporting their findings, residents tuned into the Big Garden Birdwatch Live for expert commentary and interviews wi You will read the books, devouring one after the other and trust me Dick Francis has a lot of novels (over 40 by my last count).

But on a sudden impulse, he throws in his respectable desk job to join a firm which transports racehorses all over the world.

The man who owns the company humors Henry by giving him the job, but he's sure that the titled nobleman won't stick it out for very long.However, unlike most of Francis's novels, our hero spends very little time on horseback, and racing constitutes a very minor part of the story. He's happiest when he's piloting a small rented plane on his days off, alone in the skies over Britain. Externally, very smart, with only some minor shelfwear to the head and tail of the spine and extremities. There's the usual quiet, but secretly strong hero, getting mixed up with crooks and finding love along the way, also having his ass kicked by the bad guys but getting the better of them through sheer perseverance and endurance.