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Inspector Green Mystery #7
This Thing of Darkness: An Inspector Green Mystery
In the seventh book in the acclaimed Inspector Green series, an old man is found beaten to death on a street corner in Ottawa’s Byward Market. Initially, the killing appears to be a mugging gone wrong. However, the mystery deepens when the victim is identified as Dr. Samuel Rosenthal, a retired psychiatrist with a contentious approach to life and treatment. Green discovers that the doctor recently changed his will to disinherit his estranged son and to benefit several former patients whom he believed he had failed. But who is the young mystery woman seen visiting Rosenthal’s home every Saturday night? And more importantly, what does she know about the doctor's death? Green races to track down the young visitor, but he is unprepared for the final resolution, which leaves him grappling with the ultimate meaning of justice.
352 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
Barbara Fradkin
29 books170 followersBarbara Fradkin (nee Currie), an award-winning Canadian mystery writer and retired psychologist whose work with children and families provides ample inspiration for murder. She is fascinated by the dark side and by the desperate choices people make.
Her novels are gritty, realistic, and psychological, with a blend of mystery and suspense. She is the author of three series, including ten novels featuring the exasperating, quixotic Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, and three short novels about country handyman Cedric O'Toole which provide an entertaining but quick and easy read. FIRE IN THE STARS is the first book in her new mystery thriller series which stars passionate, adventurous, but traumatized aid worker Amanda Doucette.
Fradkin's work has been nominated for numerous awards, and two of the Inspector Green books have won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. Fradkin was born in Montreal but lives in Ottawa.
Series:
* Inspector Green Mystery
Awards:
Arthur Ellis Award
◊ Best Novel (2005): Fifth Son
◊ Best Novel (2007): Honour Among Men
Her novels are gritty, realistic, and psychological, with a blend of mystery and suspense. She is the author of three series, including ten novels featuring the exasperating, quixotic Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, and three short novels about country handyman Cedric O'Toole which provide an entertaining but quick and easy read. FIRE IN THE STARS is the first book in her new mystery thriller series which stars passionate, adventurous, but traumatized aid worker Amanda Doucette.
Fradkin's work has been nominated for numerous awards, and two of the Inspector Green books have won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. Fradkin was born in Montreal but lives in Ottawa.
Series:
* Inspector Green Mystery
Awards:
Arthur Ellis Award
◊ Best Novel (2005): Fifth Son
◊ Best Novel (2007): Honour Among Men
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 22, 2022
I loved this book and could not put it down. When you live in Ottawa and know all the places this book takes you it is so much fun. The Mike Green series is the best!
March 10, 2025
In this addition to the series, Inspector Green faces several challenges investigating the latest crime. He is required to work with a new detective who has a different investigative style, consider the difficult questions posed in the treatment of mental illness and think carefully about the impact of race on the implementation of justice, During this time, a critical event occurs which affects everyone at the Elgin Street police station and this case will have Green questioning the true meaning of justice.
The body of an old man is discovered on Rideau Street in the Byward Market in downtown Ottawa. He had been attacked and badly beaten about the head, his frail body wrapped in a sleeping bag and abandoned in an alley. The elderly gentleman was unlike those who usually populate that area of the city at night. He was well dressed in fashionable but outdated clothes, including a three-piece suit and tie and a camel hair coat. What was he doing in that section of town, filled with tourists during the day but drug dealers, muggers and hookers at night? Everyone know to avoid it. And who would ever beat a defenseless old man? Granted his pockets are now empty and his shoes are missing, but too much has been left at the scene including an old gold chain with a Star of David, to consider it a mugging. Was it meant to be an antisemitic statement?
Marie Claire Levesque has recently joined the detective squad and Brian Sullivan is impressed with her work. She is smart, bilingual and ambitious and he has assigned her as lead on the case. Her methods differ sharply with those of Inspector Green and he is less enthusiastic about how she is handling the work. Green is known to be meticulous and thorough. He chases down every lead and examines every nuance in the clues they collect, whereas Marie Claire works quickly and avoids lines of inquiry she believes are a waste of time. It grates on Green who has difficulty keeping his fingers off the case. But Sullivan, who know Green never trusts anyone to work a case as well as he does, urges him to leave Levesque alone and let her do her job.
The victim is identified as Samuel Rosenthal, who was once the Chief Psychiatrist at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital. He is also the author of numerous research papers but lost the respect of his colleagues when he began questioning the widespread use of drug therapy in the treatment of mental illness. In his practice, he avoided the use of medication, advocating the use of alternate treatment therapies which focused on patient empowerment.
A tape from surveillance video the night of the attack shows four dark young men, dressed in black hoodies swaggering down the street, clearly drunk or high on drugs, oblivious to their surroundings and looking for sport. Marie Claire’s theory is that this is a case of random assault, a pointless mugging by a couple of immigrant thugs. She identifies two of the young men and believes she has enough evidence to proceed with charges, but Green has noticed there is also a young woman on the video close to the scene of the crime and wants to investigate further. Green knows Levesque has great instincts, but she is not his kind of detective; she is too casual, cocky and jumps to conclusions too quickly.
The police learn that Sam Rosenthal had only one child, a son David who moved to the States thirty years ago. They have been estranged ever since and do not communicate. Green also discovers that Rosenthal had recently changed his will, now worth over six million dollars and in that will, money that was to be left to his son has been redirected to six of Rosenthal’s former patients. It was meant to be compensation for what Rosenthal considered his poor treatment advice which he believed may have cost them in health, happiness and success in life.
Levesque and Green navigate a complex web of leads working the case including antisemitism, street gangs, homelessness and immigrants, creating a solid mystery. Fradkin uses the crime as an opportunity to raise social and cultural issues about mental illness, those who suffer from it, the families who try to support them and the staff who treat them. She also describes what life is like on the streets in the tough neighborhoods where immigrants make their homes and where it is difficult, if not impossible for children to avoid violence either in their own homes or in the street. They either join the tough guys and beat others up or endure being beaten themselves. They quickly learn that to stay safe, they must hang with the tough guys to get their protection. The gangs are also a refuge for friendship, excitement and belonging. Many of the young boys caught in these circumstances came from brutal terrifying places, from refuge camps where abuse was rampant and where they needed a strong sense of self-preservation to survive.
I am enjoying this series with its Canadian setting, realistic characters and its well plotted mysteries. This story, like the others that preceded it, is well written, with a pace that never lags and a long list of suspects to keep readers guessing. Once again, to fully appreciate the challenges of investigating the crime, the interactions between the key players and the supporting cast, it is important to read these books in order. Otherwise they will miss much of what makes this series so very good.
The body of an old man is discovered on Rideau Street in the Byward Market in downtown Ottawa. He had been attacked and badly beaten about the head, his frail body wrapped in a sleeping bag and abandoned in an alley. The elderly gentleman was unlike those who usually populate that area of the city at night. He was well dressed in fashionable but outdated clothes, including a three-piece suit and tie and a camel hair coat. What was he doing in that section of town, filled with tourists during the day but drug dealers, muggers and hookers at night? Everyone know to avoid it. And who would ever beat a defenseless old man? Granted his pockets are now empty and his shoes are missing, but too much has been left at the scene including an old gold chain with a Star of David, to consider it a mugging. Was it meant to be an antisemitic statement?
Marie Claire Levesque has recently joined the detective squad and Brian Sullivan is impressed with her work. She is smart, bilingual and ambitious and he has assigned her as lead on the case. Her methods differ sharply with those of Inspector Green and he is less enthusiastic about how she is handling the work. Green is known to be meticulous and thorough. He chases down every lead and examines every nuance in the clues they collect, whereas Marie Claire works quickly and avoids lines of inquiry she believes are a waste of time. It grates on Green who has difficulty keeping his fingers off the case. But Sullivan, who know Green never trusts anyone to work a case as well as he does, urges him to leave Levesque alone and let her do her job.
The victim is identified as Samuel Rosenthal, who was once the Chief Psychiatrist at the Rideau Psychiatric Hospital. He is also the author of numerous research papers but lost the respect of his colleagues when he began questioning the widespread use of drug therapy in the treatment of mental illness. In his practice, he avoided the use of medication, advocating the use of alternate treatment therapies which focused on patient empowerment.
A tape from surveillance video the night of the attack shows four dark young men, dressed in black hoodies swaggering down the street, clearly drunk or high on drugs, oblivious to their surroundings and looking for sport. Marie Claire’s theory is that this is a case of random assault, a pointless mugging by a couple of immigrant thugs. She identifies two of the young men and believes she has enough evidence to proceed with charges, but Green has noticed there is also a young woman on the video close to the scene of the crime and wants to investigate further. Green knows Levesque has great instincts, but she is not his kind of detective; she is too casual, cocky and jumps to conclusions too quickly.
The police learn that Sam Rosenthal had only one child, a son David who moved to the States thirty years ago. They have been estranged ever since and do not communicate. Green also discovers that Rosenthal had recently changed his will, now worth over six million dollars and in that will, money that was to be left to his son has been redirected to six of Rosenthal’s former patients. It was meant to be compensation for what Rosenthal considered his poor treatment advice which he believed may have cost them in health, happiness and success in life.
Levesque and Green navigate a complex web of leads working the case including antisemitism, street gangs, homelessness and immigrants, creating a solid mystery. Fradkin uses the crime as an opportunity to raise social and cultural issues about mental illness, those who suffer from it, the families who try to support them and the staff who treat them. She also describes what life is like on the streets in the tough neighborhoods where immigrants make their homes and where it is difficult, if not impossible for children to avoid violence either in their own homes or in the street. They either join the tough guys and beat others up or endure being beaten themselves. They quickly learn that to stay safe, they must hang with the tough guys to get their protection. The gangs are also a refuge for friendship, excitement and belonging. Many of the young boys caught in these circumstances came from brutal terrifying places, from refuge camps where abuse was rampant and where they needed a strong sense of self-preservation to survive.
I am enjoying this series with its Canadian setting, realistic characters and its well plotted mysteries. This story, like the others that preceded it, is well written, with a pace that never lags and a long list of suspects to keep readers guessing. Once again, to fully appreciate the challenges of investigating the crime, the interactions between the key players and the supporting cast, it is important to read these books in order. Otherwise they will miss much of what makes this series so very good.
October 7, 2024
Hooked from the very start though it was light and love with the first chapter then quickly went dark and mysterious. Fradkin has a way of pulling me into the angst, the tension and the chaos with relatable characters, sweet ideas and then smashing me with brutality that needs to be sorted.
In This Thing of Darkness, we are introduced to the most likely suspect very quickly, along with the eager newly hired detective that is determined to find the evidence to match her theory. When she does begin a great collection of proof, Michael Green - the main character - is suspicious of how it's all working out.
Green is a character that is so multi-layered it makes him real to me. Like someone who doesn't simply figure it all out and who goes home at the end of the day. He has real struggles, within his personal and professional life like many of us do. It makes me root for him, and his relationships, even more.
A great read with lots of twists and a different look at mental health and well-being.
In This Thing of Darkness, we are introduced to the most likely suspect very quickly, along with the eager newly hired detective that is determined to find the evidence to match her theory. When she does begin a great collection of proof, Michael Green - the main character - is suspicious of how it's all working out.
Green is a character that is so multi-layered it makes him real to me. Like someone who doesn't simply figure it all out and who goes home at the end of the day. He has real struggles, within his personal and professional life like many of us do. It makes me root for him, and his relationships, even more.
A great read with lots of twists and a different look at mental health and well-being.
January 11, 2022
All in all this was a good book with a compelling storyline that mostly made sense and was true to this author's style of offering a bunch of suspects, multiple motives, and some unresolved elements in the end.
The editing could use some work as there were several typos, repetitions of sentence fragments, and overuse of certain phrases that could have been substituted.
The editing could use some work as there were several typos, repetitions of sentence fragments, and overuse of certain phrases that could have been substituted.
October 13, 2021
This was an OK read for me, but I would not consider it one of the best in the series. Lots of misdirection by the end and I am not sure who if anyone was guilty.
June 2, 2022
Ending made no sense. People have been convicted on lesser evidence than what the police find presented! Can't say I would be in a hurry to read more by the author
July 6, 2024
This takes place in the city I live in, and is neat to read about the characters going to places I go to, especially the ones in this book, on Rideau Street!
November 3, 2024
I loved this volume of the Inspector Green Mystery.
March 17, 2015
This Thing of Darkness, by Barbara Fradkin, begins with the death by beating of an elderly man in a very unsavory part of Ottawa, an area that by day is home to tourist shops and the visitors to whom they cater and by night is the province of prostitutes, gangs and the homeless. Inspector Michael Green is called in, but as an administrator he has to leave the day-to-day running of the investigation to his new officer, Marie Claire Levesque. At first they think the man was one of the many unfortunates who frequented the area, but soon they learn that he was in fact a retired psychiatrist, well-respected and by no means on the skids. Why was he wandering around the Byward Market area at 3 in the morning, then? And who would want to beat him so savagely, especially as he was a fairly frail old man? Green and Levesque have differing opinions about the answers to those questions, but they must somehow work together to solve the mystery before another innocent dies.... This is the seventh book in Fradkin's series featuring Inspector Green, but it's the first that I have read. I very much enjoyed it, although it was clear to me that I was missing some nuances because of having not read the earlier books first - in several places, Fradkin references the outcomes of incidents that must have appeared in the earlier novels and having no knowledge of those incidents hampered my enjoyment of the book at hand. However, that is of course my problem, not Fradkin's (and I'm resolving it by already buying the first two novels in the series in e-book form!). The characters are all well-drawn, with interesting backgrounds and interactions, and the murder suspects are thick on the ground and entirely plausible. Definitely worth a look!
December 1, 2010
* * 1/2
It's probably a bad sign when you hear about an interesting-sounding book, put it on the to-read list, eagerly snap it up later at the bookstore, then, when you're ready to read it a few months later, you read the back and think "Hmmm... this is less interesting than I thought it would be."
That is what happened with This Thing of Darkness. I was first interested by the setting (I have a soft spot for mysteries set in Ottawa) and the plot sounded okay when I first read about it. The cover also made the book look very intriguing. However, by the time I picked it up again and read the back, I realized that I would pretty much be reading only for the local colour, as the plot had lost a lot of its glimmer. Unfortunately, the local colour was not enough; I got cross with the endless repetitions of "Rideau Street" (where the crime occurred) right out of the gate, and the other place names only sporadically worked their magic. Add to this the fact that I am not enamoured of mysteries that begin with heartwarming family scenes instead of the actual crime, even if the crime is introduced fairly quickly, and one aspect of the characterization that I am pretty sure is just my pet peeve, and you have a book that I would not be recommending, certainly not as your starting point for this series.
I heard about this book via Margaret Cannon in her "New in Crime Fiction" for October 31, 2009.
It's probably a bad sign when you hear about an interesting-sounding book, put it on the to-read list, eagerly snap it up later at the bookstore, then, when you're ready to read it a few months later, you read the back and think "Hmmm... this is less interesting than I thought it would be."
That is what happened with This Thing of Darkness. I was first interested by the setting (I have a soft spot for mysteries set in Ottawa) and the plot sounded okay when I first read about it. The cover also made the book look very intriguing. However, by the time I picked it up again and read the back, I realized that I would pretty much be reading only for the local colour, as the plot had lost a lot of its glimmer. Unfortunately, the local colour was not enough; I got cross with the endless repetitions of "Rideau Street" (where the crime occurred) right out of the gate, and the other place names only sporadically worked their magic. Add to this the fact that I am not enamoured of mysteries that begin with heartwarming family scenes instead of the actual crime, even if the crime is introduced fairly quickly, and one aspect of the characterization that I am pretty sure is just my pet peeve, and you have a book that I would not be recommending, certainly not as your starting point for this series.
I heard about this book via Margaret Cannon in her "New in Crime Fiction" for October 31, 2009.
December 20, 2011
Another Canadian author I've never read before. This is the 7th in Fradkin's Inspector Green series and initially deals with the violent murder of a retired psychiatrist. Along the way to the conclusion we deal with Somali refugees, gangs, homelessness, societal status, and the mental problems that often connect to these as well as time consuming jobs and their efect on family life - oh, yes, and office politics and its effect on the way work is done. All that in 300 pages. It was fascinating and I'm going to have to find some more of hers.
June 20, 2013
Set in the Byward Market in Ottawa. Well written.
September 8, 2015
Another exciting book in this Green series.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews