Detective Jack Frost Prequel Books in Order

The Detective Jack Frost Prequel series follows Jack Frost through a tight run of years at the start of the 1980s. Each book covers a few hectic days in Denton, and together they explain how a scruffy, stubborn sergeant develops into the abrasive inspector already familiar from the original Frost novels.

First Frost opens in 1981 with Britain in recession and fears about terrorism and disease hanging over the town. Frost is still a detective sergeant, working under his mentor DI Bert Williams when a twelve year old girl vanishes from a department store changing room. At the same time he is worrying about his marriage, fielding impossible demands from his bosses and realising that Williams himself has disappeared.

In Fatal Frost the calendar has moved to 1982 and Denton is celebrating national news while its own problems mount. The division's first black detective, DS Waters, arrives from East London just as a series of disturbing burglaries escalates and the body of teenager Samantha Ellis is found near the railway tracks. When a second teenager is discovered dead on a golf course with his organs removed, Frost and Waters are forced into an uneasy partnership.

Morning Frost shows Frost at one of his lowest personal points. Newly widowed, he is barely through his wife's funeral when a mutilated hand is discovered in the countryside, a local businessman is shot and what looks like arson and a suspicious cycling death add to the workload. DC Sue Clarke, already entangled with Frost outside the station, is pulled into investigations that are as emotionally draining as they are dangerous.

By Frost at Midnight it is August 1983, Frost has finally been promoted to detective inspector and DS Waters is days away from his wedding when a young woman's body is found in a churchyard. The church is also the couple's planned wedding venue, putting heavy pressure on Frost to solve the case quickly. Homeless after losing his own house, he tries to balance being best man with being the detective everyone is relying on.

Read together, the four novels form a continuous prequel to the original Frost series, rich with returning characters, running jokes and small changes in the station hierarchy. The tone is brisk and often darkly funny, but the books also take time to show how grief, institutional inertia and the rough edges of 1980s policing shape Frost into the figure who first appeared in R. D. Wingfield's work.