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Dick Francis is always a good read--fast, interesting and exciting.

Blood Sport comes from early in his career, published in 1967, and he hadn't quite settled down into his ex-jockey, or jockey as progtagonist. Here we have government agent Gene Hawkins who works for some unnamed British government agency. We know he gets the people out of jams, carries a Luger, has a dark past which had put him in some dangerous and unsavory situations. He's dealing with depression from the woman who broke up with him over a year earlier. And his father was connected to horse racing, but that's in the distant past.

For his three weeks vacation--holiday in Britain--his boss convinces him to help someone locate a horse that has been stolen. He turns it down, until he sees an accident that was actually an attempted murder.

The case sends him to the US (a rarity in Fancis books) going from New York to Kentucky to California, Las Vegas and Arizona.

As always it's a fast-paced story. I was hooked from almost the beginning. There were a couple editing things which threw me off--his editors should have spotted these issues quickly. Mainly it has to do with language. Too often in here he has Americans using British slang too easily. One that also distracted me was near the finale, he switches back and forth between torch and flashlight on the same page. In England, it's always torch, not flashlight.

As time passed, the editors got better at their job and he developed enough clout to demand better editors.

It's definitely worth the read.