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Barbara Fradkin Books in Order

Explore Barbara Fradkin books in order, from Inspector Green to Amanda Doucette, with series guides, short summaries, and clear help on where to start.

Last updated: July 4, 2026

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22 books

Do or Die

by Barbara Fradkin

2000

Green's first major case begins with a murdered graduate student in a university library. The investigation pulls him into academic rivalries and personal grudges while his rocky home life and pressure from above threaten costly mistakes.

Once Upon A Time

by Barbara Fradkin

2001

When an old man dies in what seems like natural circumstances, Green refuses to let the case rest. His search leads into wartime identities, buried Holocaust-era secrets, and a mystery that reaches uncomfortably close to his own family history.

Mist Walker

by Barbara Fradkin

2003

A teacher once accused and acquitted in a child abuse case disappears ten years later, leaving behind his dog and files on the scandal. Green must decide whether he is hunting a manipulator, a scapegoat, or something darker.

Fifth Son

by Barbara Fradkin

2004

A vagrant falls from an abandoned church bell tower after returning to his childhood village. As Green traces the history of one farm family's five sons, he uncovers loss, silence, and old wounds that never healed.

Honour Among Men

by Barbara Fradkin

2006

An unidentified woman pulled from the Ottawa River carries clues pointing to a peacekeeping mission in Yugoslavia. Green's investigation connects buried wartime wrongdoing to present-day politics, with a dead soldier's diary at the center.

Dream Chasers

by Barbara Fradkin

2007

When a teenager's body is found after a secret late-night meeting, Green is pulled into a world of elite athletes, drugs, and adolescent pressure. The case grows even more personal when the fallout edges toward his own daughter.

This Thing of Darkness

by Barbara Fradkin

2009

A retired psychiatrist is beaten to death in an Ottawa alley, and the easy suspects do not hold for long. As Green follows the victim's tangled relationships, a will, an estranged son, and old grievances drive the case toward hard moral questions.

Beautiful Lie the Dead

by Barbara Fradkin

2010

During a brutal Ottawa blizzard, Green joins the hunt for a missing young woman whose fiance fears she is running from his own powerful family. When a frozen body is found nearby, the case opens into secrets, loyalty, and lies.

The Fall Guy

by Barbara Fradkin

2011

Cedric O'Toole likes his quiet life on his backcountry farm until a woman's fatal fall from a deck he built leaves him blamed and sued. To clear himself, he has to navigate class tension, legal pressure, and small-town suspicion.

Evil Behind That Door

by Barbara Fradkin

2012

Cedric agrees to help his old school nemesis fix up a farmhouse, only to learn the man's parents have vanished and suspicion already surrounds him. Then Cedric opens a boarded-up cellar room and uncovers a history someone meant to hide.

The Whisper of Legends

by Barbara Fradkin

2012

When Green's teenage daughter vanishes on a canoe trip in the Nahanni, he heads into vast northern wilderness to find her. A broken canoe, a family legend, and a body at the foot of a cliff turn the search into a deadly puzzle.

None So Blind

by Barbara Fradkin

2014

A professor Green helped convict twenty years earlier is found dead soon after parole, still claiming innocence. Reopening the case forces the inspector to question the investigation that launched his career and the damage blind certainty can do.

The Night Thief

by Barbara Fradkin

2015

When vegetables start disappearing from his garden, Cedric O'Toole expects a petty nuisance, not a frightened boy hiding in the woods. His attempt to help uncovers neglect, danger, and a mystery that hits one of his deepest nerves.

Fire in the Stars

by Barbara Fradkin

2016

Back in Canada after a traumatic posting in Nigeria, Amanda Doucette joins the search for a missing friend and his son. The trail leads through Newfoundland's wild north, where harsh weather, old secrets, and a second body raise the stakes.

The Trickster's Lullaby

by Barbara Fradkin

2017

Amanda takes a group of Montreal immigrant teens into Quebec's Laurentian wilderness for a winter adventure. When one boy sneaks off to meet a stranger, the trip turns tense fast, with cold, isolation, and hidden motives closing in.

Prisoners of Hope

by Barbara Fradkin

2018

During a Georgian Bay charity trip, Amanda rescues a terrified woman and ends up stranded on an island. Then a doctor dies, a nanny vanishes, and Amanda realizes the quiet summer landscape is hiding something far more dangerous.

Blood Ties

by Barbara Fradkin

2019

Cedric O'Toole is stunned when a stranger arrives claiming to be his half brother. Their search for the father Cedric never knew leads to an old death, stubborn family silence, and a rural mystery that cuts close to home.

The Ancient Dead

by Barbara Fradkin

2021

Amanda Doucette is drawn into a family mystery when old bones surface in Alberta's dinosaur country and an abandoned farmhouse matches a photograph from her aunt's past. The search for a missing uncle soon collides with someone determined to keep the truth buried.

The Devil to Pay

by Barbara Fradkin

2021

Stuck in administrative work, Inspector Green follows up when his rookie officer daughter handles a troubling domestic call. What looks like a man fleeing debt and marital trouble turns into a murder case that puts Hannah in real danger.

Wreck Bay

by Barbara Fradkin

2023

On Vancouver Island's Pacific coast, Amanda Doucette befriends an off-grid artist known only as Luke. After a surfer's body washes ashore, she must untangle old secrets tied to Vietnam, a vanished commune, and a man suddenly on the run.

Cold Shock

by Barbara Fradkin

2025

Set in wintry Ottawa, this short mystery turns the cold edge of the Rideau River into a trap. Fradkin builds quiet tension around ordinary people, bad choices, and the deadly moment when someone ends up in the water.

Shipwrecked Souls

by Barbara Fradkin

2025

The murder of a recently arrived Ukrainian woman leaves only a strange name on a scrap of paper. As another death follows, Green is drawn into wartime documents, betrayal, and a painful search through the history shadowing his own past.

Where should I start?

If you want the core Inspector Green series: Do or DieOnce Upon a TimeFifth Son
If you want Green at his most personal: None So BlindThe Devil to PayShipwrecked Souls
If you want wilderness suspense: Fire in the StarsThe Trickster's LullabyWreck Bay
If you want shorter, faster reads: The Fall GuyEvil Behind That DoorThe Night ThiefBlood Ties

Author bio

Barbara Fradkin grew up in Montreal in a house full of books. Her father taught philosophy, her mother taught science, and reading was simply part of daily life. She started making up stories when she was very young, and by Grade 1 she was already writing them down.

For a long time, though, writing was something she fit around the rest of life. She earned a BA from McGill, an MA from the University of Toronto, and later a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Ottawa. She moved to Ottawa, raised a family, and spent more than twenty five years working as a child psychologist.

That career shaped her fiction in a deep way. Psychology gave her a close look at fear, grief, anger, family strain, and the stories people tell themselves in order to keep going. Those are exactly the forces that drive so many of her mysteries.

The real turn toward crime writing came while she was working on her doctoral dissertation. She has said the process felt so dry and rule-bound that she was ready to kill someone, at least on the page. So she wrote a murder mystery set in the world she knew at the time, a university setting, and that book became Do or Die, the first Inspector Green novel.

That was the turn.

Inspector Michael Green went on to become the center of her best known series, a long-running set of Ottawa police procedurals with a lot of emotional weight. Readers who start with Do or Die often keep going because the books balance solid investigation with messy family life and real moral pressure. Titles like Once Upon a Time, Fifth Son, Honour Among Men, and Shipwrecked Souls show what she does especially well, crime stories rooted in character, place, and the lingering cost of old secrets. Fifth Son and Honour Among Men both won Crime Writers of Canada awards for Best Novel.

She did not stay in one lane. Fradkin later created Amanda Doucette, a former international aid worker whose books bring mystery and suspense into some of Canada's wildest landscapes, beginning with Fire in the Stars. She also wrote the Cedric O'Toole books, short rural mysteries built around an unlikely handyman hero with more heart and ingenuity than polish. Across all three strands of her work, readers tend to find the same things, strong Canadian settings, human stakes, and a steady interest in why ordinary people make dangerous choices.

She keeps circling back to the same question, why people cross the line.

Short fiction matters to her too. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and she has won Storyteller Magazine's Great Canadian Short Story Contest twice. She has also been active in Canada's mystery community and has written with a clear interest in social justice, literacy, and the vulnerable people who are often pushed to the edges of public life.

These days, Fradkin splits her time between Ottawa and a cottage on Sharbot Lake, where she has said she does some of her best thinking. She has three children and two dogs, and when she is not writing she enjoys reading, travelling, skiing, and kayaking. That mix of sharp observation, outdoor life, and curiosity about people runs through her books from start to finish.

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shaped MRB and its growth.

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