‘Fast-paced and wryly amusing... A delight from start to finish’ – Val McDermid Detective Inspector Jack Frost is having a hard time. A young boy is found dead in a rubbish heap, suffocated and with one finger cut off. Another boy is missing. A psychopath is stabbing babies as they lie sleeping in their cots. A fifteen-year-old has been abducted, then found naked by the roadside. Frost is up to his neck in crime. And the problems keep coming. The corpse of a petty criminal is discovered, with the tops of three fingers chopped off. The small children of a carpet fitter are murdered; his wife's body is found on the railway line. A supermarket MD is sent a ransom demand for the missing boy, accompanied by one of the child's fingers... Jack Frost, scruffy and insubordinate, foul-mouthed and fearless, staggers from crisis to crisis. But beneath his bumbling exterior lie extraordinary powers of detection...