Frances McNeil, also writing as Frances Brody, is an English novelist and playwright, and has written extensively for radio.
McNeil was born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, where she now lives. She studied at Ruskin College, Oxford and has a degree in English literature and History from University of York.
As Frances Brody she has written a series of 1920s crime novels featuring Kate Shackleton. The sixth in the series, An Avid Reader, is set in the Leeds Library, the oldest surviving subscription library of its type in the UK. After nine books in the series Brody wrote a short story prequel, Kate Shackleton's First Case, in which the story begins in a Harrogate teashop. The twelfth book in the series (excluding "first case") was Death and the Brewery Queen, published in 2020, and the thirteenth, A Mansion for Murder, in 2022. Each book in the series is set in a specific location in Yorkshire. A Woman Unknown was shortlisted for the 2016 Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award, the criteria for which include: "the protagonist is a nice young woman whose life is suddenly invaded".