By Nancy Miller Chenier
Barbara Fradkin, Inspector Green Mystery Series, Dundurn Press, eleven titles from 2000 to 2021.
Inspector Michael Green, the key character in this series, is a former Lowertowner who excels at detective work with the Ottawa Police Homicide Division. The son of Holocaust survivors, he grew up in a small brick double on the Lowertown side of Rideau Street where rickety fire escapes, low rooftops and narrow laneways were his playground. He has little attachment to Jewish traditions except his commitment to smoked meat, bagels and Nate’s Delicatessen.
The author is Barbara Fradkin, a retired psychologist, who currently lives in Ottawa and apparently loves plotting murders. In the Inspector Green Mystery series, Fradkin has created an Ottawa Police Inspector who exasperates his family, frustrates his friends, and annoys his superiors. Inspector Green finds it hard to resist an investigation and along with his longtime and sometimes irritated friend, Brian Sullivan, an Irish man from Renfrew, he digs deep into cases that others at the police department wish could be left alone. He works too much and plays too little, a situation that cuts into family time with his second wife, a dedicated psychiatric nurse named Sharon, his young son, Tony, and his resentful teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Hannah
In this series of books featuring Green, Fradkin gives us locations – buildings, streets, landmarks – both inside and outside the city that are familiar. She also transports us to other national and international places. The first book, Do or Die, focuses on academic competition at the University of Ottawa and introduces Green and the other recurring figures important to the subsequent stories. For readers wanting to live some of the grittier side of the ByWard Market, the seventh book, This Thing of Darkness, takes us along familiar streets with its diverse residents and the too frequent occurrence of murder.
Fradkin provides significant insight into the dark side of human nature. She explores the Holocaust in book 2; the reality of incest in book 3; religious fundamentalism in book 4; the murky world of peacekeeping in book 5; the pressures on young athletes in book 6; contentious psychiatric approaches in book 7; and in her most recent book, Inspector Green’s daughter, Hannah, now with the police force, takes the lead in a domestic violence case. Her website suggests that a twelfth book is coming soon, so stay tuned for another good read.
