  We model the behaviour of a relativistic spherically symmetric shearing fluid
undergoing gravitational collapse with heat flux. It is demonstrated that the
governing equation for the gravitational behaviour is a Riccati equation. We
show that the Riccati equation admits two classes of new solutions in closed
form. We regain particular models, obtained in previous investigations, as
special cases. A significant feature of our solutions is the general spatial
dependence in the metric functions which allows for a wider study of the
physical features of the model, such as the behaviour of the causal temperature
in inhomogeneous spacetimes.
