Frank Elder

3 primary works • 4 total works

Ash & Bone

by John Harvey

Published 7 April 2005

In the depths of his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder's solitary life is disturbed by a call from his ex-wife, telling him his seventeen-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by the abduction and rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in the heart of London, the takedown of a violent criminal goes badly, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked.

Maddy and Frank had a brief and clumsy encounter years before. In Ash & Bone their lives connect again when a second phone call persuades Elder out of retirement, only to find that a cold case has a devastating present-day impact.

Darkness and Light

by John Harvey

Published 24 April 2006

She wore a gold dress, short-sleeved, its skirt full-length and slightly flared. He could see the faint indentation on her left hand, a pale circle of skin giving away the fact that, until recently, a wedding ring had been there. She looked peaceful, lying there on the bed, her arms resting easily together, the left hand on the right, a slender silver cross and chain encircling her neck, and not a wrinkle, not a fold of her dress out of place. And, perhaps, she truly was at peace. For she was dead.

This was the sight that greeted Detective Inspector Frank Elder on his first case with the Serious Crimes Unit. His first case and never solved; no one was ever charged; the murderer never found. At liberty to walk the streets, and to kill again.

Eight years later, Elder's estranged wife contacts him in his Cornish hideaway. Her friend's sister Claire - a quiet and withdrawn widow in her fifties - has mysteriously disappeared. Elder, reluctantly, agrees to dig around and see what he can find. Then Claire is found, dead, arranged with meticulous detail on her bed, and it doesn't take long for Elder to make the connection. It's obviously the work of the same unbalanced individual and, to find the killer, Elder must shine a light into the darkest recesses of human behaviour, the dark and twisted recesses of a disturbed human mind...

Body & Soul

by John Harvey

Published 19 April 2018

Frank Elder struggles to protect his estranged daughter and prove her innocence after her breakup with a controversial artist ends in murder.

Flesh & Blood

by John Harvey

Published 1 April 2004

Following his wife's betrayal and his own retirement from the force, Detective Inspector Elder has fled as far as it is possible to go in England without running out of land. But he is haunted by the past and in particular by the unsolved disappearance of sixteen-year-old Susan Blacklock back in 1988. Shane Donald and Alan McKeirnan, convicted just one year later for the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, remain the prime suspects in Elder's mind, and when he hears of Shane's early release from prison, he feels compelled to leave his safe haven and to revisit the scene of the crime. When Shane then breaks parole and disappears and yet another young girl is horribly murdered, Elder's involvement becomes crucial. McKeirnan seems to still wield a frightening power over his ex partner even from his prison cell, and the new murder bears the all hallmarks of Lucy Padmore's earlier death. An increasingly desperate Elder is already running out of time when his own daughter goes missing and a taunting postcard reveals that she is in the hands of the killer.