Gordon Stewart Mystery Books in Order

On paper, Gordon Stewart looks like a private eye. In practice, he is something a little stranger and more interesting. John McFetridge gives him the skills of an investigator, but also the habits of a movie crew worker and the drift of a man who is not fully sure where his life is headed next. That mix gives the Gordon Stewart books an offbeat feel right away. You get mystery, dry humor, and a lot of attention to the jobs people do when they are standing just outside the spotlight.

Gord is around forty, single, and back in his suburban childhood home after moving in to care for his widowed father. The trouble is that his father no longer really needs care, and Gord has no clear plan for what comes next. He has spent years working as a location scout in the film business. When film work slows down, he takes cases for a private security company run by ex-cops. So he knows how to look, how to wait, and how to put small details together, but he is not a swaggering detective with a grand code. He is more tentative than that, more human, and often a lot funnier.

That wobble between careers matters.

In Every City Is Every Other City, Gord agrees to find the missing uncle of a woman working on his current film. The police believe the man walked into the woods near Sudbury and killed himself. His wife is not convinced. At the same time, Gord takes on a surveillance job for OBC and starts to suspect he is being used to protect a wealthy man accused of sexual violence. Those two threads let the book move between Toronto film sets, private security work, suburbia, and Northern Ontario, all while Gord tries to decide what kind of person he wants to be when nobody is handing him a clear role.

The movie-business angle is a big part of the charm. McFetridge knows the world of location scouts, production managers, extras, and long days on set, and he uses that knowledge well. The film world here is not glamorous. It is practical, improvisational, and full of people solving problems on the fly. That makes it a smart fit for a mystery series. Gord is always surrounded by people who build illusions for a living, so it makes sense that the cases around him keep asking what is performance and what is real.

The tone is light on its feet, but the material is not shallow. The first book touches on suicide, predatory power, loneliness, and the uneasy economics of middle age. Gord is helped, challenged, and occasionally thrown off balance by Ethel Mack, a movie extra with sharp instincts and her own stage ambitions. Their exchanges give the story warmth and rhythm, and they suggest that the series is as interested in companionship and reinvention as it is in clues.

That is probably the best way to think about Gordon Stewart. This is a PI series for readers who like private-eye fiction but do not need the usual hardboiled posture. The cases matter, the danger is real, and the city is full of hidden pressures. But the real pull is Gord himself, a capable, slightly sidelined man being pushed back into the game. Start with Every City Is Every Other City and expect a mystery series with brains, wit, and a very grounded sense of modern urban life.