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FATAL FROST
by James Henry
Bantam, May 2012
400 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0593065387


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Denton is one of those places, like Midsomer, where crime abounds. FATAL FROST, the sequel to FIRST FROST, is another prequel to the popular Frost books, returning again to the early career of Jack Frost, equally well-known to television viewers on this side of the Atlantic.

The book is set in 1982, the Falklands War is in full swing, it's impossible to turn on the radio without ending up listening to Jimmy Saville, everyone seems to smoke and drinking at lunchtime is a cultural norm. Against this backdrop, Denton has been selected to take part in a new Home Office initiative called 'Ethic Diversification' and is about to play host to DS Waters, their first black policeman. The casual racism of Waters' introduction and his treatment by his colleagues does as much to ground the book in the early 80s as any of the other references that litter the early pages of the book. The attitude of Waters' fellow officers now seems as alien and jarring, albeit infinitely more unpleasant, as a world in which the police relied on finding a working phone box rather than pulling a mobile phone out of their pocket.

As ever in Denton, crime is never an isolated event. Here Frost and his team are in the middle of investigating a series of burglaries with an unpleasant twist when the body of a teenage girl is found beside a railway line. Naturally there are no witnesses to testify to the manner in which she left the train and suicide can't be ruled out, but then the body of a second teenager is found on a golf course and this is very definitely murder.

The hallmark of the Frost books always has been their multiple plot strands, some connected, some not, and this is no exception, but each is interesting in its own right, and the various narratives complement each other rather than detract, which isn't an easy trick to pull off. In my review of FIRST FROST I commented that the authors had done almost too good a job of recreating Jack Frost, presenting much the same man I was familiar with from the later books and not his younger self, but this was far less evident here. I was much more easily able to picture a younger, although no less scruffy, Frost. There are fewer references back to such features of the later books like Mullett's obsession with the crime clear-up statistics that were in danger of turning the book into a pastiche and FATAL FROST is none the worse for their absence.

I thoroughly enjoyed another trip down memory lane in Denton and I'm hoping to make another visit there soon, as I presume there will be more to come from the younger Frost. There's very definitely a lot of life left in this particular old dog.

§ Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.

Reviewed by Linda Wilson, February 2012

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