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When an old man dies a seemingly natural death in a parking lot, only Inspector Michael Green finds it suspicious. Something about the closed case has caught his eye - why did the victim have a mysterious gash on his head, inflicted around the time of his death? Talking to the man’s family only increases Green’s curiosity. They are obviously hiding something about the old man, who lived in isolation as though avoiding painful memories. A search of his house turns up an old tool box with a hidden compartment containing a German ID card from World War II. Was the victim a Jewish camp survivor or a Nazi soldier trying to escape imprisonment? Or had he been a Polish collaborator who had sold his own people into slavery and death? Could someone have tracked him down for revenge? Even Green, with all his experience, could never have imagined the truth. The sequel to Do or Die is not only a tightly plotted police mystery, but a compelling tale of unhealed emotional wounds from a time of unspeakable atrocity.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

10 people are currently reading
140 people want to read

About the author

Barbara Fradkin

29 books162 followers
Barbara 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

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5 stars
55 (20%)
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140 (50%)
3 stars
73 (26%)
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
Profile Image for Lisa the Tech.
175 reviews16 followers
February 10, 2025
Two stars for the most part but a four star ending. Went with 3.5 at the end of it.
Profile Image for Mae.
264 reviews5 followers
July 4, 2021

I find these stories to be very entertaining and full of information. In this particular story there is a lot of information about the Holocaust and the way it impacted Jewish and non-Jewish people during WWII. I thought the story was very well told and not told for sensationalism.
In this story Inspector Mike Green, his wife Sharon and 1 year old son have moved to Barrhaven a suburb of Ottawa. Mike is not happy with this move because it increases his commute to work, and he is an inner-city kid and does not understand suburban living.
Mike is going crazy at work because there have been no murders for him to investigate and he hates pushing paper, filling forms, and attending meetings. He would sooner be investigating. He has been accused of making up a murder just to investigate. Which is what it seems he is doing in this book.
An old man is found dead in the parking lot of the Ottawa hospital on a cold winter day. The medical examiner rules that he died of natural causes. Mike does not think so because of a small blow to the man’s head around the hair line. And so the investigation begins.
I really think Mike Green is rather a selfish character because it is all about him. He must know what happened even at the risk of his home life and causing problems for his work life. He is right a murder has been committed but there is a big cost to his determining this fact.
The story was well written and full of information about the hunt for Nazis and collaborators of the Nazi regime. I was a bit surprised by the ending but when I thought about it, it did make sense. I was also surprised by the ending because of what Mike Green did or did not do.

Profile Image for Valerie Campbell Ackroyd.
539 reviews9 followers
October 15, 2022
I was intrigued by this mystery because it takes place in Ottawa, a city I am very familiar with and is a change from my mostly British mystery reading. The storyline is almost exhausting though: an Inspector Green, tired of desk duty and wanting to get back into solving murders again, hears about the death of an elderly man in bitter November weather in the parking lot a hospital. I can't remember--because I kept putting the book aside for more urgent library loan books--why Green thought it was murder rather than an accident but he spends 3/4 of the book trying to prove it was. He harasses the man's relatives, follows up on information that leads him to think that the victim was either a Holocaust survivor or a war criminal, confronts his own Jewish identity, lets his wife down time and again over an important family event, alienates people, etc., etc....

There is one quote that rather sums his character up: "Green wondered what it was about him that compelled others to defend themselves even before he had accused them. It was an idle question, of course. He knew the answer. He treated everyone as if they were guilty, and he shifted moods so unpredictably that witnesses never felt secure about what he was thinking." The reader feels this same kind of dizziness. Perhaps the strength of Fradkin's writing is that she keeps Green in character, meaning that if you decide in the first five chapters that you are intrigued by Green and the way he operates, you will, as a mystery/detective story reader, enjoy the book. If you don't like him, you probably won't enjoy the book either.

I ultimately did find the book quite readable. It's a good mystery, resonated quite a bit with me having, as I said, been very familiar with Ottawa, Montreal and Hamilton too, and also having had many friends in my college years whose parents were Holocaust survivors, refugees from Poland and the Eastern bloc. I'm glad to have finished it though, it's not a very happy story.
Profile Image for Elisabeth.
1,964 reviews
January 3, 2019
I think this is the second in the Inspector Green series — published in 2002. I have enjoyed later ones in the series. This one was Ok, but I had a few quibbles:
- there was a bit too much “information dump” regarding the Holocaust etc — it was key to the story but it was like Fradkin didn’t want to leave out anything she knew. Her husband was a War Crimes prosecutor so she did legitimately have a lot of info, but a lot of it is not new and I found my eyes skipping long paragraphs.
- I found myself anxious about Green’s total focus on his cases, to the point of repeatedly disappointing his family, neglecting to show up for events or do things he’d promised to do. His wife seems to take it in stride, but I worried about her and their marriage.
However, it’s well written, and kudos to Fradkin for building a successful career as an Ottawa author.
2,310 reviews22 followers
November 9, 2024
Inspector Michael Green of the Major Crimes Unit of the Ottawa Police is on the hunt for a killer no one else believes exists. Eighty-year-old Eugene was found lying dead in the snow in the middle of a busy hospital parking lot. He had been waiting in the car for his wife to return from an appointment, but died of hypothermia before he was found, lying flat on his face on the ground. There was a gash on his forehead, the only sign of potential violence, which later proved not enough to kill him. Some attributed it to the old man hitting his head as he fell, but Green suspects foul play although he has no evidence to support it. Even pathologist Dr. Alexander MacPhail scoffs at the Inspector's theory and Green agrees he has a valid point. Who would ever want to kill an ordinary sick old man? But still the niggling mystery of the fresh head wound bothers him and Green is always drawn by the lure of a puzzle to solve. He wants to know exactly what happened, so he listens while others refer to the victim’s advanced age, the fact he was an alcoholic, had many age-related illnesses and slipped on the ice, fell, and was left long enough to experience hypothermia and subsequently die. It all fits the facts and makes sense, but for Green, it just does not feel right. Just because Walker could have died for those reasons, does not mean he did. Intuition has always been Green’s powerful ally in detective work and that is leading him to question this easily reached theory everyone else has accepted.

Inspector Green is like a dog with a bone when he takes on a case, determined to uncover any clues, chase every lead and carry out every interview, even when those around him feel he is wasting his time. While investigating Eugene Walker’s life, Green begins to suspect the man was a Polish refugee and although he claimed to have no memory of the war, Green begins to believe the man played a sinister role in the atrocities carried out in Europe, a role he has kept secret from his family.

Fradkin places the legacy of the Holocaust at the center of her novel with Green searching for clues hidden deep in the lost events of World War II. As he searches for answers within Walker’s family, he learns about an incident in a bar twenty years ago which leads him to more questions about who Eugene Walkers was, why he came to Canada and what if any role he played during the war in Europe. The investigation pulls Green closer to home than some of his other work as his research about the Holocaust leads him to conversations with his father that he has never had before. Those conversations begin to build a bridge with the man Green has cared about all his life, but never fully understood. He has always known his parents were Holocaust survivors who had lost their families in the war, but they had always kept the horror of those experiences from their son. Now Green realizes how little effort he has made to understand the fear and secrecy that has hung over their lives. It brings Green to question how he has treated the man who has endured so much and raises more questions about his own role as a parent to his young son Tony.

Mike, his wife Sharon and Tony are now in their new home. They moved from their crowded downtown one bedroom Ottawa apartment to the suburbs and finally have the space they so desperately need. Green, an inner-city boy raised in the brick tenements of Lowertown, hates what he calls “the vinyl cube” on its postage size lot with just a few twigs for trees. He finds no pleasure in what others call the joys of home ownership and detests the one-hour commute to work, often in bumper-to-bumper traffic, a trip that used to take him ten minutes from the apartment. But the house was an important concession to Sharon who is happier and the move helped to smooth over a difficult time in their marriage which now appears to be in a better place, although Green has not changed his behavior, still continuing to run his life as if he was the only person in it.

Fradkin’s story of this investigation mirrors the narrative she has created, a stripped-down crime investigation, with few distracting details about Green or his family. In fact, we have only brief sketches of them, since Greene’s life is all about the current investigation. Even his superiors at the station are referred to only in passing and readers would never be able to pick them out in a crowd. The only other character that readers come to know more fully is Brian Sullivan, the tall detective and friend Green has known since they were rookies on the street. Green often chooses to work with Sullivan although they work in very different but complementary ways. Green often sprouts several different possibilities or theories about a crime, while Sullivan provides the sober second thought, listing all the flaws in Green’s logic, keeping his colleague’s feet on the ground. Sullivan also leads a very different home life, devoted to his first love Mary and their three children, enjoys his home and spends his weekends in various DYI projects. After so many years together, Green is shocked to learn about a piece of Brain’s past he never knew, but fully explains his friend’s fierce devotion to his family.

Fradkin continues to remind readers of her setting in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, referring to the surrounding areas of Renfrew and Hamilton, commonly used streets, the easy commute to the Toronto airport and Montreal, and the hot spots such as Nate’s Deli. She refers to the recently amalgamated police force, designed to improve service but now steeped in a bureaucracy with it meetings, statistics, memos and endless reports. Green avoids the endless administrative tasks as much as he can and takes every opportunity to be out in the field, running down a case. He is often reminded by Superintendent Adams Jules that his role is to lead others in the field, not to do the work himself, that he is an inspector, not a field man. Yet the superintendent often looks the other way, knowing Green’s tenacious drive and intuitive intelligence has given him one of the highest solution rates on the force.

This is another good addition to the series. I enjoy the Canadian setting and the strict focus on the skillful deductive reasoning required to solve a crime and will certainly continue to the next book in the series.

Profile Image for Linda Hartlaub.
615 reviews10 followers
September 27, 2020
I read the third and fourth books of the Inspector Green series before this one (the second book). I'm glad I went back and read this, as it answers so many questions about Green's change of attitude towards his father and family. In addition, this book is raw and unabashed about telling the story of the Jews in WWII Poland. It does not sugar coat anything, leaving the reader shaken but thankful that the story is told. But each chapter begins with a poem, written by one of the characters in the book (who will remain nameless in this review since it would contain spoilers), which gives so much humanity to the characters and adds to the tragedy that unfolds. Ms. Fradkin knows her history about the Holocaust since her husband is a prosecutor of war crimes in Canada. I urge everyone to read this book, even if you are not a mystery fan. The history alone makes it worthwhile.
270 reviews2 followers
December 31, 2021
Another good Inspector Green.
He's getting more likable as a character.
The mystery of this book is compelling and convoluted, but not so much that we can't follow.
My one complaint about it is that nowhere, ever, would a cop be allowed to run with a case as a murder unless the cause of death supported it. Also that he didn't immediately think of what the weapon might have been as soon as he saw the wound. I didn't even see it and I knew right away from the description what had killed him. The who and why did keep me guessing for the entire four hours I was reading this book though!
Profile Image for Kendra.
405 reviews8 followers
August 11, 2022
I am hooked on the Inspector Green series now! Book two of a police procedural set in Ottawa takes Michael Green deep into his Jewish past when an old man with ties to the Holocaust dies and Inspector Green digs into his death, unearthing shocking secrets far from Europe and WWII. A really strong mystery with excellent character development!
22 reviews
August 10, 2025
This is second in the Green series but the first that I have read by Fradkin. I look forward to reading the first and the subsequent stories about Inspector Green. Fradkin does a good job of keeping the reader in suspense until the very end. Was the victim a holocaust survivor or a war criminal. Was his death from natural causes or murder?
Profile Image for Lynne Baxter.
40 reviews1 follower
May 22, 2018
The second Inspector Green is just as good as the first one.
Profile Image for Ellen.
495 reviews
May 9, 2020
The second book in the Inspector Green series. A good, quick, easy-to-read crime novel. As with the first in the series, three and a half stars rounded up.
Profile Image for Jill McGillicuddy.
109 reviews1 follower
October 24, 2022
Good Mystery With Some Serious History

I'm really enjoying the Michael Green series. This one was the perfect balance of WWII history, and Mishka's need to solve puzzles.
50 reviews
April 5, 2025
I found it a bit slow in the beginning but I wanted to finish it as it picked up.
Profile Image for Alison C.
1,449 reviews18 followers
March 17, 2015
Once Upon A Time is the second in the Inspector Green series by Barbara Fradkin. When an old man dies in a hospital parking lot, apparently of hypothermia, the Ottawa authorities are content to declare it a "natural death" and to leave it at that. Something doesn't look right to Inspector Mike Green, however, and he decides to investigate on his own time, with the help of Sergeant Sullivan of course. Together, they learn some unsavory details about the dead man, but it's only when another old man disappears that they start realizing that the death was anything but natural, and the causes reach far back into another time and place: Poland in World War II, to be precise. And the most intimate secrets of that past return to haunt the present.... I started this series in the middle and went back to the beginning because I enjoyed it right away, even though Inspector Green is not the most pleasant of characters: he's moody, self-involved and selfish, to name a few reasons to dislike him. But he's also dogged, determined and gifted with an ability to follow his own leaps of intuition, so that the reader is fascinated by his methods of detection. I generally don't read stories (or watch films) dealing with the Holocaust; as a TA during my undergraduate years, I worked for a professor who taught a course on the subject and after screening "Night and Fog" a half dozen times and listening to the recollections of survivors a gazillion times as I laboriously transcribed them, I figured I've paid my dues. But I'm glad I read this one, because it shows that during that (or any) time, the motives of humans are far more complex than we often believe. Recommended.
1,082 reviews14 followers
September 12, 2013
Time passes, everyone ages, and the past blurs. Except that some parts of the past remain clear forever. Canada has made mistakes in its past and those mistakes rise up and hit back. I appreciate a story about well known historical events cast in Canadian terms as this one is. There are many Canadians who have grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust and what makes it worse for many is the knowledge that there are/were Nazis who entered Canada with the knowledge of the government, people who suffered no punishment for their crimes and who were allowed to blend into Canadian society as some sort of counter to the communists who were such a source of fear to the powers that be. This story picks up threads from a number of spots in Poland and weaves them into a complex situation spreading from Hamilton to Montreal and Ottawa.
This is a long running series with continuing characters, including Insp. Green's second wife and new son. We are given enough information to see the people and we learn new facts about even long time characters like Sgt. Sullivan and it seems that Green has learned enough to know that he has to at least try to keep his job within working hours.
Profile Image for LJ.
3,159 reviews305 followers
September 7, 2007
ONCE UPON A TIME – G+
Barbara Fradkin – 2nd in series (Canadian – police procedural)
When an old man dies a seemingly natural death, only Inspector Michael Green finds it suspicious. Talking to the man's family only increases Green's curiosity. A search of his house turns up an old tool box with a hidden compartment containing a German ID card from World War II. Gradually, suspects emerge, including members of the man's own family. But even Green, with all his experience, could never have imagined that the truth would come so close to his own life.
***One of the things I find most interesting about Ms. Fradkin’s writing is that the pace of the writing very much reflects the character of the protagonist – steady and dogged in his investigation. This is not a bad thing. If anything, her character has a more realistic tone than some. You feel his frustration with his job, the problems he has balancing it and his life with his new family. These are not tires squealing, guns blazing books, but very well written police procedurals. I enjoyed it very must.
190 reviews3 followers
June 10, 2013
The first Barbara Fradkin I had read was her latest, Whispers of Legends. I really enjoyed it and decided to start at the beginning of her series. This second was just amazing. Inspector Green is the only one sees murder when the body of an old man is found in a hospital parking lot. The verdict is natural causes, but Green has suspicions that there is more to this death. His investigations unearth long-held secrets and a truth that hits closer to home for Green than he might ever have imagined. A story of family, war crimes, justice and self-identity. The pacing and tension of the story is excellent. Fradkin's writing is amazing.
Profile Image for Adrian.
181 reviews3 followers
November 29, 2013
A historical mystery that is as much about untangling that past as it is about the present. Don't expect your typical thriller. The author - wait, I mean the main character, Inspector Green - has a wonderfully trenchant attitude to his life that makes him believable and, to me, an attractive narrator, though the many other characters (it's a large cast) lack the room for much detailed development.
67 reviews1 follower
September 14, 2016
Yes!!! I enjoyed the first book in the series. Second one just as good or better. Will start the third one tonight. Inspector Green is no Gamache, too many flaws, but endearing in his own way. Glad I discovered Barbara Fradkin. The fact that the series is set in Ottawa with investigating spilling over into Quebec and other parts of Ontario makes it more interesting to me.
272 reviews1 follower
February 1, 2015
couldn't put it down

What a good story - it was quite difficult to fathom who the murderer was but it all came together in the end. I like that it's also about inspector green and his family but not distractingly so. Highly recommend.
Profile Image for Dianne.
288 reviews9 followers
January 3, 2013
Enjoyed this book as I live in the area where it is set. Book started off a little slow but once into it ...was a very good read.
Profile Image for Tessa.
506 reviews7 followers
February 7, 2014
A really good read on a distressing subject well written and keeping one guessing until the end. I will read more of this author.
Profile Image for Rej Jereca.
71 reviews8 followers
February 15, 2015
i like the twist though i find the story pace slow it still is a good read.
Profile Image for Richard.
619 reviews1 follower
February 4, 2017
Best part of this was the location commentary. The story was somewhat hard to follow but did make sense in the end. I think Green needs better developed supporting characters.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews

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