Book info

• Title Hard Frost
• Author R. D. Wingfield
• Year 1995
• Genre Mystery

Detective Inspector Jack Frost is having a hard time. A young boy is found dead in a rubbish heap, suffocated and with one finger cut off. Another boy is missing. A psychopath is stabbing babies as they lie sleeping in their cots. A fifteen-year-old has been abducted, then found naked by the roadside. Frost is up to his neck in crime. And the problems keep coming. The corpse of a petty criminal is discovered, with the tops of three fingers chopped off. The small children of a carpet fitter are murdered; his wife's body is found on the railway line. A supermarket MD is sent a ransom demand for the missing boy, accompanied by one of the child's fingers... Jack Frost, scruffy and insubordinate, foul-mouthed and fearless, staggers from crisis to crisis. But beneath his bumbling exterior lie extraordinary powers of detection...

Thoughts

Another great installment of the Inspector Frost series. Very similar to all the others, in that there are many different cases, with lots of different people - some of the threads intertwine and some don’t. Some spark off clues to others, and some are entirely separate.

Frost is his usual grumpy self, although this time he has not one, but two colleagues to try and get on side. One of them is a woman, and that means this book is more full than usual of hideous stereotypes and sexism. A sign of the times, perhaps, but it did make me more uncomfortable than normal.

There was less depth in this story, I think, than in previous ones. I’ve mentioned before how, if Frost was trudging through a forest in the depths of winter, you could almost shiver along with him. I didn’t really get that this time. The concentration seemed to be more on the gruesome crimes within - and they were certainly more gruesome than ever before.

None of these are big complaints though. I read it in a very short space of time, and as it ended, realised I’ve been happy with the way all of these books have finished. That’s not something I can normally say.

In fact, my only real complaint is that the fifth book, and only the fifth one, in the six-book series is not available on the Kindle. What is that about?

Rating: 4 / 5