The Devil to Pay
Barbara Fradkin’s Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green is back, in the eleventh novel of this gritty and well-loved police procedural series.
Inspector Green is no longer in Criminal Investigations: he’s now an administrator, in charge of security at the Ottawa Courthouse. Hannah, the rebellious daughter who spent her first sixteen years living with Green’s first wife in Vancouver, is now a cop, a rookie officer in the Ottawa force. She respects her father’s investigative experience, and wants to be a good cop. She’s also aware that he’s been known to find ways around the rules in order to solve a case, and thinks that’s maybe worth emulating too.
She and her assigned mentor, a more senior officer, respond to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance in an upscale neighborhood, at the home of a well-known lawyer and his wife. The call was placed by a neighbour, but both husband and wife say everything is all right. Hannah is sure the wife is being abused, though the woman denies it. But when one of them disappears, it’s not the wife: it’s the husband. His car is found at the airport. Has he left voluntarily —or is this a coverup for something worse?
Then a body turns up. Now it’s a murder case.
Hannah, having been involved from the beginning—the 911 call to the house—wants to be part of the solution. Though she’s not on the team investigating the murder, she keeps finding ways to look into what happened. Her father is exasperated with her, but is drawn to support her efforts, and she does have a knack of finding out information that others have missed.
This is a smart, enjoyable read, with engaging and realistic characters and a fast-moving plot.
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 Michael Green By 2014 she had written ten Inspector Green novels. Two of them won the Best Novel award from the Crime Writers of Canada: Fifth Son (2005) and Honour Among Men (2007).
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 four with The Ancient Dead.
Doucette 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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