The Frost Trilogy

The Frost Trilogy brings together Peter Robertson's novels Permafrost, Mission, and Colorblind, which follow the amateur sleuthing of Tom Frost, a semi-retired businessman caught up in the cases of missing persons in northern Michigan, Boulder, Colo., and New Orleans, respectively.


In Permafrost, Tom is a wealthy Chicago businessman with too much time on his hands, a man who “displayed impeccable manners and looked earnestly concerned when he had to”; one who “had taken no chances.” Keith is close to homeless and adrift somewhere in northern Michigan. They were friends once, two decades ago, in a working-class Scottish town brought vividly to life in a series of evocative flashbacks. Now the hunt to find one brings life-affirming purpose to the other. An intuition of impending danger proves to be frighteningly accurate as a small lakeside town grudgingly reveals its dark underbelly, in this debut crime novel that Booklist calls

In Mission, a decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee, Nye Prior, for a life of craft beer and biking. He isn't necessarily any richer or happier, but he is certainly older and fitter. On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young man pulled from the flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn't very unusual; in fact another man had drowned in the creek just a few weeks ago. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before but Tom hasn't and his instincts kick in with a vengeance. He is soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

—Booklist

Colorblind, the trilogy finale, looks at the city of New Orleans through the eyes of a seasoned tourist and explores music both as a means of salvation and a road to obsession. An impulsive act of theft coincides with an inexplicable death in the suburbs of Chicago. A long drive south to Louisiana follows the trail of an obscure folk singer who had drowned years ago in trusted waters. Before all the connections between the two deaths can be revealed, a series of hunches will lead Tom to dark and depressing truths about the nature of fandom and the fallibility of instincts. In the hunt for answers, Tom rediscovers his own love of music, his suppressed vulnerability, and the realization that this time around not all his hunches are good ones.

and confirms “Tom's appeal [is] his tantalizing ambiguity”—Booklist

—Windy City Reviews