Author:R D Wingfield
‘Fast-paced and wryly amusing… A delight from start to finish’ – Val McDermid
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…
Crime pick of the year. Darker, funnier and more violent than the television adaptation, but just as high quality
—— Daily TelegraphInspector Jack Frost (is) deplorable yet funny, a comic monster on the side of the angels
—— GuardianWhat impresses me most is the extraordinarily vivid interplay between the police characters. Frost himself is splendidly drawn
—— The TimesFast paced and wryly amusing, Frost's latest outing is a delight from start to finish, a unique and unlikely blend of humour and tragedy. More please
—— Val McDermid , Manchester Evening News'The wittiest of detective writers'
—— Daily MailDeath in the Stocks is that rare and refreshing thing - a clever problem stated, developed and finally solved in terms of character
—— The TimesMiss Heyer's characters act and speak with an ease that is as refreshing as it is rare in the ordinary mystery novel
—— Times Literary Supplement