Abbie Frost Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Abbie Frost is the pseudonym of the author Chris Curran that is a native of London though as an adult she moved to the South Coast of England, to the small town of St Leonards-on-Sea. As a young teen, she loved reading and famously quit school to go become a staffer at the local library which had been her dream job. She spent several idyllic months reading all manner of books in the library before going back to full-time schooling. Frost would later graduate from high school and get a degree from Sussex University. Since graduating from college, she has worked a variety of jobs including as a teacher, actress, copy editor, and script editor even as she fantasized about her books one-day becoming bestsellers.

Abbie has said that the inspiration for her debut novel “The Guesthouse” was her reading of closed circle mysteries that were very popular in the second decade of the 21st century. In 2019, she was lucky to be invited to the “Queen Mary 2” to give a talk on the history of English whodunits. To prepare for her lecture, she had to read many of the authors she loved including Francis Isles, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Frost had informed her editor that she would be giving the talk. He had suggested that while she was at it, why not write a modern country house mystery in the 21st-century setting. As such, “The Guesthouse” is a remote mansion though the lead characters that populate it are not the rich elite that is to be found in many of the golden age mysteries. Rather, they are a combination of ordinary people who go online to book a vacation and find themselves thrown together in a remote mansion. They are having a good time but as the days and weeks go by, it is discovered that all the visitors have dark secrets and startling connections to The Guesthouse. It seems that neither the house nor its visitors are what they seem to be.

Like many of her contemporaries, Abbie Frost always loved reading and believes the authors such as Alan Garner, Philippa Pearce, and C.S. Lewis with their distinctive worlds continue to influence her perspectives on fiction writing. As an adult, some of the authors that have been a huge influence include Patricia Highsmith, Wilkie Collins, Barbara Vine, and Daphne Maurier as they create conflicted and complex characters that are often caught up in crime almost unwittingly. Her first venture into fiction writing was when as a teen she wrote a fan fiction piece spun from one of Enid Blyton’s stories of a group of teens that foiled the disgraceful schemes of criminals. As for why she writes thriller fiction, she has asserted that she only writes what she loves to read though she gets the most satisfaction when she writes and finishes a compelling narrative.

Abbie Frost’s “The Guesthouse” is a novel about a woman in her mid-twenties’ woman named Hannah. She has decided that even though her fiancé Ben died mysteriously, she is going to take the vacation to County Mayo’s “GuestHouse” that they had planned together months earlier. Her fiancé had ended their relationship after he learned that she had been unfaithful to him before he had an accident on his bike that killed him. Given the circumstances that led to his death, many in his family and a lot of his friends believe Hannah had something to do with it and she is ignored at the funeral and harassed on social media. On her part, she feels guilty for what happened to her fiancé and it is not long before she is drinking heavily. Fearing for her health, her mother recommends she take the vacation they had planned with Ben hoping that getting away will provide the tranquility she needs to heal. When she arrives in town, she learns that the Guesthouse is in a remote location inaccessible by car and she has to walk through thick mud to get to the front door. At the house are six other guests including a hip rock artist named Lucy, A man and his son, Rosa and her husband Liam alongside their child Chloe, and an ex-policeman Sandeep. But what as to be a quiet vacation quickly turns into a nightmare as the gardener turns up dead, the heater does not work, the Wi-Fi stops working, the voice of a child crying in the middle of the night is heard even as the guests are getting killed off one by one. They have no way of getting out of the Guesthouse once a storm hits the county, and what they have to do is work together to find the clues to the mystery of the house and in the process escape with their lives.