Forgotten Frost

In Whitby, the frost gets into everything. The cobbles. The bones. The truth.

For thirty-three years, Barnaby Scaife has lived on the edge of Whitby — homeless, voiceless and shunned — because an entire town decided he was guilty of murdering his girlfriend, Lilly Ackroyd, after she vanished without a trace.

He has always denied it. And he never stopped hoping she would come back to him.

Then a young woman's bones are discovered bricked behind the wall of an old house, and his hopes fade.

DCI Frank Black, part of the original investigation, must now face the possibility that they condemned an innocent man, and let a killer walk free.

But the truth is evasive. Especially when the key suspect, Hector Dinsdale, is lost to dementia, while his sister, Edith, is non-verbal. Barnaby, too, struggles to communicate because of a brain injury.

Frank's best chance of righting the injustice is DI Gerry Carver-Foley, a detective who can find meaning in the most silent of places.

But as they close in on what really happened to Lilly, Frank's own secrets begin to weigh heavily — secrets that could shatter the person closest to him.

Every wall he tears down brings his own a brick closer to collapse.

Frost hides everything.

Until it thaws.