DC Frost
DC is a second-generation Angelino. Her first novel, A Punishing Breed, published by Red Hen Press in 2024, received a New York Times recommendation. DC has published several literary short stories in various journals including UCLA’s Westwind. She had a long career in nonprofit fundraising before turning to writing full time. DC appreciates California’s melting pot of class, culture, and natural beauty. Frost lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a pack of rescue dogs. DC and her husband have an adult son.
All Books
Description:
In Mexico City for a family funeral, Detective DJ Arias encounters a group of Robin Hood–style thieves who call themselves the Jaguars. Their activities reach across the border into Los Angeles with a Hollywood murder that entangles LA’s elite and the nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners who serve them, and threatens DJ’s own loved ones. A follow up to the mystery A Punishing Breed, A Shadow of Jaguars finds DJ and partner Bobby Talbot struggling to untangle a murder where Hollywood, wealthy powerbrokers, and an immigrant population struggle to coexist and survive. Throughout it all, his faithful dog Evidence is by his side.
Advanced Praise
“The police procedural is given fresh rendition in Frost’s deft delivery taking us beyond physical and psychological borders into a Southland from where schemes and calamities spring. And a cop who is more than a cop, seeks answers because the dead demand justice in this topical, yet timeless excursion into human frailties.”
—Gary Phillips, author of The Haul
Description:
A Punishing Breed, the first in a series of novels featuring Detective DJ Arias, is a murder mystery that takes place in Los Angeles, the city of angels, freeways, Santa Ana winds, and honeysuckle slithering through chain-link fences and perfuming LA’s dark streets and neighborhoods. Detective Arias hunts for a murderer on a liberal arts campus that prides itself on its progressive curriculum but is rife with jealousy, racial and sexual tensions, and a hierarchy as real and destructive as a medieval fortress. DJ Arias, good at his job because he sees the worst in people, is challenged by the college community, a neighborhood recluse, and a young Latino gardener he sent to jail ten years ago for a hit-and-run accident. Through the course of his investigation, Arias will find out no one is who they appear to be. He begins to reclaim his humanity by adopting a dog he names Evidence and finding the clues to a crime born from a dark secret not contained in the past but alive in the present, which will cast destruction and murder on the denizens of the small liberal arts campus.
ADVANCED PRAISE
“In this mystery debut, novelist Denise Frost takes us through the lush world of a tiny liberal arts college and its murderous undergrowth. Masterfully moving between voices, the plot and the psychological twists push us forward, keeping us compulsively reading to the very last page.”
—Désirée Zamorano, author of Human Cargo and The Amado Women