My Guilty Pleasures : Brian Freeman's Frost Easton series

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I'm a fan of Brian Freeman's novels and when I saw that there were three books in this series, I though I'd give the first one, The Night Bird, a go and I was hooked, reading the next two, The Voice Inside and The Crooked Street back to back.







So ... what made me want to read them all together. As usual with these sort of books it was the cast of characters. Detective Frost Easton, a Justin Timberlake lookalike has a tragic past ... but as

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crime fiction fans know that's pretty much par for the course for the main detective, so there had to be something more that drew me to him. Perhaps it's the fact that he lives in a very posh house in San Franciso, purely by merit of having rescued a murdered woman's cat - the victim, in her will,  left the house to whoever looked after her cat as long as they live there. Easton, although he lives in the luxurious accomodation sleeps on the battered old sofa he brought from his old flat. He also takes the cat out and about in his cat carrier a lot- quirky and nice.

Then, of course there are the other characters that Freeman has also brought to life on the page. Easton's best friend is a seventy year old hippy artist who takes street art to an entirely new level and, co-incidentally has brought about a program where the city's homeless have access to phones so they can keep safe.

Easton's brother,Duane, is a top chef with the nickname 'Beaston' and a reputation that would put Gordon Ramsay to shame. 
However, even with this cast of quirky characters, Freeman needed more to tempt me from book one to book two to book three ... yep, you got it... It's the plots and the writing style.

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Each story-line is beautifully interwoven. The Night Bird is an in depth conversation about memory and the impact of interfering with peoples memories. It starts off with a startling and completely unexpected death and progresses at speed find the person responsible for planting memories that make the victims commit suicide. - Brilliantly executed. 

Then, The Voice Inside takes us back into Frost's past to the trauma that resulted in him becoming a cop. Poignant , tragic and relentless, this turns the usual put the killer behind bars story on its head when within a few chapters the killer is actually released - Genius!

For book three, Freeman changes the feel, with a plot that leaves Easton wondering who to trust and suspecting a wide ranging, mafia style operation in San Francisco. Not content with a gripping, ruthless read, Freeman leaves us on a knife edge where i'm desperate to read book four in the series.

In summary, these are American police procedurals with a distinctive main character, quirky subsidiary characters, unusual and compelling plots and a all written with an easy flow that makes the time speed by.
Highly recommended