Crime and the City has ventured to Canada a few times previously—we checked out the crime writing of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto so it would be churlish of us not to pay the capital city, Ottawa a visit. Or, the Ville d’Ottawa—we take no sides at Crimereads!
And so of we go to the province of Ontario, a million or so people and the capital but only the fourth most populous city in the country. What can we expect of Ottawa’s crime writing—surely some political skulduggery?
Well, let’s kick of with the twelve book Inspector Green series from Barbara Fradkin. Ottawa homicide inspector Michael Green is obsessed with his job. In his first outing, Do or Die (2000), a young graduate student, the scion of a rich family, is found expertly stabbed in the stacks of a university library, but no one seems to have the slightest idea why. university politics, rich parents, girlfriends all feature.
Each of the dozen books is a decent mystery and all (except with an excursion to the former Yugoslavia) are set in the capital with great locations such as Ottawa’s Byward Market, the Nahanni River and elsewhere right through to the most recent Shipwrecked Souls (2025) with dead Ukrainian refugees turning up in Ottawa.
Kevin Hopkins writes the Ottawa Detective series. Hopkins grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa after his family moved to Canada from England. He has a trilogy all featuring Detective Terry Millar, a criminal profiler in the city of Ottawa. In A Striking Similarity (2019), two murderers on the loose in Canada bears shocking similarities to each other. In Reserved for Murder (2020) Millar is back when the body of a teenage boy is found hanging from a homemade noose and for the Ottawa Detectives, the evidence doesn’t add up. Everything points towards a local reservation.
And finally in The Art of Murder (2020) Detective Sue Penner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) stumbles on a murder at an art gallery event. Working together Penner and Millar have no witnesses. They have no motive, but as we all know, little is murkier that the art world!!
And one more series that features an Ottawa cop—Brenda Chapman’s four-book Stonechild and Rouleau Mysteries featuring Officer Kala Stonechild, who has left her Northern Ontario detachment to join a specialized Ottawa crime unit and her new boss, Detective Jacques Rouleau. In Cold Mourning (2013) it’s a week before Christmas when wealthy businessman Tom Underwood disappears into thin air.
In book two, Butterfly Kills (2016), Rouleau is in a fight against time to keep his dysfunctional team together long enough to get to sort out the innocent from the evil. In Tumbled Graves (2016) Stonechild and Rouleau investigate the case of a missing girl with a side trip to question a Montreal biker gang in Quebec.
And finally, in Shallow End (2017) English teacher, mother, wife, and convicted child predator Jane Thompson has made parole and has a plan. She begins her life in the shadows while she bides her time. One month later, the bludgeoned body of the student she was found guilty of corrupting four years earlier is found on the shores of Lake Ontario. Queue the final Stonechild and Rouleau investigation.
Time for a little Ottawa true crime. Keith Landry is a Saskatchewan-based writer and journalist. He’s published a whole bunch of books under the series title Murder Tales in the Ottawa Valley. Landry is a great researcher and digs out the details of old murder tales buried for years in old newspapers.
A few more Ottawa-set and -related crime novels:
- Peggy Blair’s Canadian detective Mike Ellis is in Old Havana. In Midnight in Havana (2013) he ends up working with Inspector Ricardo Ramirez, head of the Major Crimes Unit of the Cuban National Revolutionary Police. The two team up again in Blair’s The Poisoned Pawn (2016), this time in Ottawa.
- Breena Clarke’s Uncle Ronald (1996). Old Mickey is one hundred and twelve years old. He can’t remember what he ate for lunch today, but he can remember every detail of what happened one hundred years ago, when he and his mother ran away from his violent father to take refuge in the hills north of Ottawa.
And finally, what has been billed at Ottawa’s first crime writing anthology: A Capital Mystery (2025). Put together by crime author Mike Martin (the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series set in Newfoundland) and Bernadette Cox and sponsored by the Crime Writers of Canada association. It’s great on locations: Orleans, the Market, Little Italy, Strathcona Park, Barrhaven, Greely. One reviewer called the anthology “a love letter to Ottawa and its surrounding landscapes.”
And that’s Ottawa—a lot of series and a lot of cops!…. Elbows Up Canada!!
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