Frost at Christmas - R.D. Wingfield

...sort of. Hey, if the BBC and ITV can use him to boost viewing figures, why shouldn't I? I've seen A Touch Of Frost, starring David Jason (which Yorkshire Televison have been adapting from R.D. Wingfield's books since 1992) often enough, but this is the first of his books I've read (and indeed the first in the series of Frost books) and it was good. Nothing to write home about, but good. Frost At Christmas, published in 1984, begins with a 999 call from an old man who has shot an intruder. When the police arrive they are shocked to find that the intruder is Detective Inspector Jack Frost. Ohgawdblimey! David Jason shot. Dead? ...  Read the complete review

Detective Inspector Jack Frost has his hands full. It’s only a few days till Christmas, and an 8-yrear old girl, Tracey Uphill, has gone missing after attending Sunday School. Her prostitute mother, busy with a client, fails to meet her. There have been recent attempts to abduct young girls, and the client also has a false alibi. When Frost visits the vicarage, he finds pornographic photos of young girls that the vicar has taken. And a local witch claims the spirits have shown her where to find the body: in Dead Man’s Hollow! As if that wasn’t enough for the inept Frost to be handling, someone has been trying to break into the local bank, and instead of ...  Read the complete review

One of the saddest things I have seen in a bookshop was a child wanting to exchange a book he'd been given because he'd "seen it on television". The book was "Wind in the Willows". Television rarely does justice to the books that are, or will become, classics. With the "police procedural" type of novel it's easy to think that there's little point in reading the book when television has revealed the perpetrator of the crime. You think the fun will have gone, and, in most cases, it has. So far I've only found two exceptions : W. J. Burley's "Wycliffe" novels and R. D. Wingfield's ...  Read the complete review