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.