Shipwrecked Souls
On a cold winter dawn, in an alley in a low-rent west end Ottawa district, an elderly woman is found dead. She’s wearing a well-cut wool coat but has no purse or ID. Who is she, and how did she die? Rookie pokice detective Josh Kanner is sent to follow up.
The woman’s gold earrings and delicate necklace are still intact, so she’s not likely a vagrant or the victim of a mugging. Her clothing appears expensive, with labels in Cyrillic; this suggests she’s an immigrant, maybe Russian. But nobody with her description has been reported missing.
The postmortem discovers she was smothered; now it’s a murder investigation. Josh is too junior to head up the inquiry; his boss Sgt. Gibbs takes over the case, though Josh is still on the team.
Josh is in a new relationship with police patrol officer Hannah Green, daughter of veteran Inspector Michael Green. Josh and Hannah are keeping their relationship quiet, not wanting to face locker-room gossip from colleagues or risk her father’s disapproval.
Inspector Green is no longer in Criminal Investigations; five years ago he was shuffled off to an administrative job at the courthouse. But he still itches to follow front-line investigations. He thinks Josh has promise, and knows that Josh and Hannah are close. He guesses that Josh is sharing info about the case with Hannah. He tries to feed advice to Josh through Hannah, as well as sharing ideas with his own friends on the force.
Ultimately, Green gets involved in aspects of the investigation himself, even though it’s not his case. Discoveries extend into recent events (the war in Ukraine) and history (the Holocaust, World War II, Jewish refugee claims). Green finds himself involved in ways he didn’t anticipate.
This is a terrific addition to the long-running Inspector Green series. The characters are well-developed, the history is well-researched, and the tension and pacing are tight. I highly recommend it.
Barbara Fradkin grew up in Montreal. She completed a BA at McGill University, attended the University of Toronto for her MA, then married and moved to Ottawa to work and raise a family. She completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa, and worked with children and families for twenty-five years as a child psychologist. That experience has given her an affinity for the dark side, along with the insight and inspiration for her stories.
In 2000, she published her first novel, Do or Die, introducing Inspector Mike Green. Two books in the series won the Best Novel award from the Crime Writers of Canada: Fifth Son (2005) and Honour Among Men (2007). Shipwrecked Souls is her twelfth Inspector Green novel.
Fradkin also writes two additional crime series: in 2011 she began a series of easy-read novellas featuring Cedric O’Toole, a country farmer/handyman, and in 2016 she published the first in the Amanda Doucette series., now up to five with Wreck Bay (2023).
Fradkin lives in Ottawa. She is Past President of Crime Writers of Canada, and is also a member of Sisters in Crime and Capital Crime Writers. Her late husband was a war crimes prosecutor with the federal Justice Department.
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