Frank Marshal Books in Order

The Frank Marshal Crime Thriller series introduces a different kind of lead to Simon McCleave’s Welsh crime world. Frank Marshal is a retired detective who has swapped major investigations for a quieter job as a park ranger in Snowdonia, but trouble has a habit of finding him anyway.

Frank lives in a remote part of the national park with his wife Rachel, who is living with dementia. He spends his days on patrol in the hills and forests, dealing with lost hikers and wayward campers, trying to keep their life as calm and predictable as he can. That calm shatters when an old friend calls asking for help.

In Marshal of Snowdonia, Annie, a retired judge, begs Frank to look into the disappearance of her sister from a local caravan park. What begins as a favour turns into a nightmare as they uncover links to a series of 1990s murders and the possibility that the wrong person has been in prison for years.

False Witness sees Frank questioning a local man’s apparent suicide, only to peel back layers of lies, official denials and possible government involvement. In Deadly Care, he and Annie witness the shooting of a much‑loved GP and are drawn into a case where old medical mistakes and hidden resentments may have proved fatal. Later books like Fatal Love and Blood Mountain promise to keep Frank in the line of fire, often high in the mountains where weather and terrain are as dangerous as any suspect.

Frank is older than most series detectives, and that’s part of the point. He has decades of experience, a body that doesn’t bounce back like it used to, and a marriage shaped by illness and shared history. His friendship with Annie gives the books a different rhythm to traditional police procedurals—two determined, sometimes stubborn retirees using their brains, contacts and moral sense to dig into cases others would rather leave alone.

The stories still have the pace and twists you’d expect from McCleave, but the focus on an unofficial investigator allows the series to wander into grey areas: old miscarriages of justice, secrets that never reached the charge sheet, and communities where people would rather settle scores quietly than involve the police.

If you enjoy the Snowdonia setting but like the idea of a lead who’s no longer bound by police rules, the Frank Marshal books make a natural next step after the Ruth Hunter novels.