Ellis Portal Mystery Books in Order

The Ellis Portal books follow one of the more unusual mystery leads in modern crime fiction. Ellis begins the series as a former Toronto judge who has fallen very far, living rough near the Don River Valley after a ruinous collapse in his professional and personal life. In Free Reign, that broken life is interrupted when he finds a severed hand wearing a ring that links the case to his own past. From there, Aubert builds a series that is part murder mystery, part character study, and part long look at justice from both sides of the bench.

Ellis is never a standard private eye.

He is proud, wounded, stubborn, intelligent, and often painfully aware of what he has lost. That gives the books their center. He knows courts, lawyers, and the habits of power, but he also knows shelters, rooming houses, street friendships, and the rules people make when ordinary systems stop protecting them. The contrast matters. Aubert keeps pushing Ellis between those worlds, and the tension between them gives the series much of its force.

Toronto matters here. Not just as scenery, but as a working city with sharp borders and hidden crossings. The books move through ravines, hostels, shelters, film festival crowds, police offices, courtrooms, and older neighborhoods where memory hangs on. In The Feast of Stephen, Ellis is drawn into deaths among homeless people that look accidental until they clearly are not. In The Ferryman Will Be There, a murdered film director and a missing daughter pull him back toward the streets and the people who know how to survive there. The cases are varied, but the setting keeps reminding you that wealth, danger, neglect, and authority all live close together.

There is also an ongoing personal arc running underneath the mysteries. Ellis is trying to understand what kind of man he is after disgrace, and whether a damaged life can still be useful. Old allies, old rivals, family ties, and legal loyalties keep resurfacing. Some books lean harder into the social side of the series, others into the legal side, but they all circle questions of responsibility, mercy, and whether institutions can ever deliver clean justice.

Redemption is the real long game.

The series is not perfectly linear in feel, which is part of its charm. Leave Me By Dying goes back to 1965 and shows Ellis as a young law student in Toronto, before the fall that defines him later. Red Mass finds him further along in rebuilding his legal life, while Don't Forget You Love Me brings him back into danger after he has tried to step away from investigating altogether. Taken together, the books show a man moving through failure, survival, and uneasy recovery.

If you like urban mysteries with a legal edge, strong sense of place, and a real interest in people living at the margins, this series has a lot to offer. It is serious without being cold, compassionate without going soft, and best read in publication order if you want to watch Ellis Portal change book by book.