A Touch of Frost cover art

A Touch of Frost

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options
Buy Now for £15.51

Buy Now for £15.51

About this listen

Detective Inspector Jack Frost, officially on duty, is nevertheless determined to sneak off to a colleague's leaving party. But first the corpse of a well-known local junkie is found blocking the drain of a Denton public lavatory and then, when Frost attempts to join the revels later on, the nubile daughter of a wealthy businessman is reported missing.

Sleepy Denton has never known anything like the crime wave which now threatens to submerge it. A robbery occurs at the town's notorious strip joint, the Coconut Grove, the pampered son of a local MP is suspected of a hit-and-run offence and, to top it all, a multiple rapist is on the loose. Frost is reeling under the strain, his paperwork is still in arrears and now, more than ever, his self-righteous colleagues would love to see him sacked. But the manic Frost manages to assure his superior that all is under control. Now he has only to convince himself...

©1987 R. D. Wingfield (P)1997 Isis Publishing Ltd Crime Fiction Mystery Police Procedural Fiction Crime Suspense
All stars
Most relevant
As usual a great listen. Frost stumbles from one case to another and when everybody thinks he's list the plot it all comes together. well worth listening to.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A somewhat bleak but eventful story of 1980s policing. Jack Frost is a downtrodden but canny police inspector who is lax with his paperwork, untidy and unkempt in appearance and whose superior officers and close colleagues look down their noses at him. Frost has to use all his wits to tackle a workload that brings him up against grisly murder scenes, unsavoury local characters, prostitutes, strippers, belligerent members of the public and petty criminals. All these encounters eventually combine to enable Frost to solve the crimes and arrest the perpetrators.

The author writes Jack Frost as a coarse, outspoken, chain smoking character who leers over young women and we see few of the redeeming qualities to his personality that were evident in the TV series. The story was full of detail and well written although now dated in style, particularly in the attitude and use of female characters.

Listening to this book was hard going in places and loses a star because this particular narrator chose to use such an unpleasant and irritating voice for Jack Frost that his portrayal of him only seemed to emphasise the more unsavoury aspects of his character.

Not the TV Jack Frost

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
As with other Frost books I've listened to, I enjoyed this a lot. It's interesting to see David Jason's version toned down a lot of the character's more crass and sexist side but still an rounded and slightly sad character. The performance is very good, only draw back is the narrator sometimes speaks v quietly and this makes the lines hard to hear.

Great story and pretty good performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This story has so many strands that it kept me absolutely hooked. Frost in print is a lot scruffier and more crude than Frost on the tv, and there were elements of the story, particularly the jokes about rape, that were difficult to hear, but these were of the time and show how quickly our sensibilities have changed. However impossible Frost's behaviour, I couldn't help wanting him to succeed against all the odds.
The narrator does a fantastic job to maintain the pace and interpret all the different characters through their voices. I just found Frost's voice a bit jarring over such a long listen.

I couldn't stop listening

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
First I should mention that this is the second in the series after Frost at Christmas. I didn't realise this until I was pretty far along into the listening.

Jack Frost in this book is much coarser than on TV although not necessarily to his detriment. Webster, who was his Watson, was painfully slow and blunt. This got to be quite frustrating as the book went on.

This is different lots of the other murder mysteries in that there were many cases ongoing at at same time which made a refreshing change. However, I binged this over a few days and you may struggle to keep track of characters if this was spread over a month's worth of short commutes.

I guess the book has dated badly but there is a weird dichotomy between Frost and co learning about bikinis for the first time and just about every female character being up for it to some degree or other. And Frost's lack of tact sometimes also differed from TV a bit.

The narration and voices were good but the volume does dip sometimes so you'll need to tweak your headphones or speakers occasionally.

Overall, if you like police procedural stuff then this will be a decent read. If you're looking for a novelisation of the TV show then you're out of luck.

Not bad but not as you'd expect from tv.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews