Hard Frost

Detective Inspector Jack Frost knelt down beside the tiny body. Who did this to you, sonny? he asked, his face tight with compassion. The boy was eight years old, bound and gagged, and stripped naked. He had been dead for some seven or eight hours. Frost should have been on holiday, he had sneaked back into the station late at night to help himself to some of Divisional Commander Mullett's cigarettes and this case had been dumped on him as no other officers were available. And then another boy is reported missing. The following day, the ransom demand: 250,000 or the boy dies like the first. Coarse and insubordinate, fearless and intuitive, D.I. Jack Frost stumbles from crisis to crisis as he tries to cope with a child-stabbing pervert, the discovery of a decomposing body in a coal bunker, a suspicious suicide, an equally suspicious burglary and the abduction of a teenage girl.