The Frank Meredith Mysteries
Retired Detective Inspector Frank Meredith knows that a record can be wrong, a memory can harden into certainty, and the truth is not always the same thing as proof. These are fair-play mysteries set beneath Kinder Scout and across the villages of the Dark Peak.
Complete series
Frank Meredith has spent a lifetime reading the small things other people overlook: frost where it should not lie, a line missing from a record, a story repeated too neatly to be true. Now retired and living in the Peak District, he is not looking for cases. The valley has other ideas.
Read in order for the full arc, or begin with any book: each mystery stands on its own.
Book one
When mountain rescue volunteer Gordon Askey is found dead below Kinder Downfall, the verdict appears simple: a careful man, a winter hill, a fall. But Frank Meredith sees the frost beneath the body — and knows it should not be there.
To find his friend’s killer, Frank must reopen the 1998 investigation that made his name and confront a valley that has kept its own account of what happened.
The first clue
Buy The Kinder Falls ↗Book two
A moor fire strips back Kinder Scout and exposes the remains of a woman missing since 1989. For thirty-nine years, Hollinsett has repeated the same story of her disappearance. Every part of it is true. None of it is enough.
With no surviving file and nowhere to begin except the people who remember, Frank follows a case built from damaged memory, old loyalties, and one ordinary object waiting in plain sight.
A village remembers wrong
Buy Madwoman’s Stones ↗Book three — the final mystery
Frank knows the truth of Terry Padley’s murder. He just cannot prove it.
When a long-buried clue resurfaces, Frank is forced to confront the difference between an unsafe conviction and a guilty man. At the same time, Ruth Deakin begins searching for the life her missing mother meant to have — and finds a truth the valley has spent decades refusing to see.
The truth is not the evidence
Buy The Padley Ring ↗Reading order
About the author
Frances Holme is the pen name of a former detective with Greater Manchester Police, who has lived in and breathed in the Peak District, Derbyshire, for the last forty years.
Those four decades in the landscape — the gritstone edges, the peat bogs, the villages that keep their secrets — and three decades in law enforcement have given Frances Holme something most crime writers do not have: the knowledge of what a lie looks like, and the ground it is told on.
The Frank Meredith mysteries are written in the fair-play tradition: every clue is on the page, and the reader is trusted to see what the detective sees. The interest is less in the chase than in the small things that give a lie away: frost that lies the wrong way, a record that does not reconcile, and the quiet decency of ordinary people under suspicion.
Reader updates
The Frank Meredith trilogy is complete. For the latest on future Frances Holme books and new editions, visit the trilogy on Amazon.
All three Frank Meredith mysteries are now available together.
View the trilogy ↗