Howard Engel Books in Order
Find Howard Engel books in order, with quick summaries, series guides, and simple where-to-start advice for Benny Cooperman and his other mysteries.
Last updated: July 4, 2026
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Publication Order
20 books
The Suicide Murders
by Howard Engel
1980
Myrna Yates thinks her husband is having an affair, but Benny's routine snooping leads instead to an apparent suicide. The details do not add up, and Benny stumbles into blackmail, corruption, and more deaths.
The Ransom Game
by Howard Engel
1981
Muriel Falkirk wants Benny to find Johnny Rosa, an ex-con tied to a long-ago kidnapping and missing ransom money. Soon Benny is caught in a scramble where too many people want the cash, and somebody is ready to kill for it.
Murder on Location
by Howard Engel
1982
A missing-wife case takes Benny to Niagara Falls, where a movie crew has turned the place into a spectacle. Then murder strikes, and show-business glamour gives way to old grudges and real danger.
Murder Sees the Light
by Howard Engel
1985
Benny heads into the Ontario wilderness to keep an eye on a controversial evangelist hiding at a lodge. When a local guide is found dead, the quiet retreat turns into a tense and isolated murder case.
A City Called July
by Howard Engel
1986
Benny is asked to look for a vanished lawyer who has cheated members of Grantham's Jewish community. The search pulls him into mob ties, local grudges, and the uneasy life of the city around him.
A Victim Must Be Found
by Howard Engel
1988
Hotelier Pambos Kiriakis hires Benny to recover a missing list of borrowed artworks, then is murdered before the matter is settled. Benny follows the trail through Grantham's wealthy and connected, where art and motive mix badly.
Dead And Buried
by Howard Engel
1990
A widow asks Benny to reinvestigate her truck-driver husband's supposedly accidental death. What he finds points toward suspicious testimony, toxic dumping, and danger inside a well-protected company.
Murder in Montparnasse
by Howard Engel
1992
Canadian journalist Mike Ward lands in 1920s Paris and is drawn into the Left Bank world of writers, artists, and hangers-on. When a woman's death may have been hidden behind the crimes of a serial killer, Ward starts asking dangerous questions.
There Was an Old Woman
by Howard Engel
1993
When the caretaker of Benny's building asks him to look into Lizzy Oldridge's death, the case seems sad but simple. It quickly opens into a knot of trusts, dirty politics, and local secrets nobody wants aired.
Getting Away With Murder
by Howard Engel
1996
Crime boss Abram Wise wants Benny to find out who is trying to kill him. The investigation drags Benny into old family wounds, buried injustice, and a case where the past is anything but finished.
Lord High Executioner
by Howard Engel
1996
A brisk, darkly curious nonfiction tour through the history of hangmen, headsmen, and capital punishment. Engel is interested as much in the people who carried out executions as in the systems that employed them.
A Child's Christmas In Scarborough
by Howard Engel
1997
Part parody and part memory piece, this illustrated book looks back at a suburban Canadian Christmas with warmth and a sly edge. Engel turns family rituals, small embarrassments, and holiday chaos into something funny and familiar.
Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell
by Howard Engel
1997
In 1879 Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell and his young student Arthur Conan Doyle look into the conviction of a man sentenced for killing an opera star and her lover. It is a Victorian mystery built on deduction, atmosphere, and doubt.
Crimes of Passion
by Howard Engel
2001
Engel turns to true crime, examining cases where love, jealousy, and obsession ended in murder. The book looks at the stories themselves and at the legal and cultural ideas wrapped around them.
The Cooperman Variations
by Howard Engel
2001
An old college crush asks Benny to protect her after another woman is shot in her place. Undercover inside a television network, he finds power games, tangled inheritances, and more than one reason for murder.
Memory Book
by Howard Engel
2005
Benny wakes in a Toronto hospital after a brutal head injury, unable to read properly and struggling to hold onto memory. Using a notebook and help from Anna, he tries to piece together the case that nearly killed him.
Man Who Forgot How To Read
by Howard Engel
2007
In this memoir, Engel recounts the 2001 stroke that left him unable to read while still able to write. He traces the slow, stubborn work of rehab and his fight to return to a life built on words.
East of Suez
by Howard Engel
2008
Still dealing with memory problems, Benny Cooperman heads to the tropical city of Murinam to look for a missing old friend. The search leads him into a sunlit maze of locals, secrets, and sudden death.
The Whole Megillah
by Howard Engel
2012
While visiting Toronto, Benny Cooperman agrees to help a rare-books dealer recover a stolen ancient Jewish manuscript. Then the client turns up dead, and a simple theft becomes a sharper, stranger mystery.
City of Fallen Angels
by Howard Engel
2014
In 1940 Hollywood, Canadian journalist Mike Ward is sent to cover a studio executive's supposed suicide. The deeper he digs, the more the movie business starts to look like another branch of the underworld.
Where should I start?
If you want to meet Benny from the beginning: The Suicide Murders → The Ransom Game → Murder on Location
If you want Howard Engel at his most personal: Memory Book → The Man Who Forgot How To Read → East of Suez
If you want historical mysteries instead of small-town PI work: Murder in Montparnasse → City of Fallen Angels → Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell
If you want a quick sample before committing to the series: The Whole Megillah → There Was an Old Woman
Author bio
Howard Engel was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1931, and the Niagara region never really left him. You can feel that in his fiction. Even when his stories wander to Toronto, Paris, or Hollywood, his writing keeps a strong sense of place and a sharp ear for the way people really talk.
Before he was a novelist, he taught school for a short time. Then he moved into broadcasting and built a long career with CBC Radio, working as a writer, reporter, and producer. He spent time reporting from Europe and later helped shape literary and drama programming in Toronto.
That broadcasting life nudged him toward fiction. Engel later said that after interviewing enough writers, he started to think he might as well try it himself. Out of that came Benny Cooperman, a private investigator who was about as far from the usual glamorous tough guy as you could get.
That was the point.
In The Suicide Murders, The Ransom Game, and Murder on Location, Engel built a detective series that felt local, funny, and pleasantly offbeat. Benny is Jewish, cautious, often short of money, and more likely to think his way through a problem than fight his way out of one. Readers tend to like the books for their dry humor, the Niagara and small-town Ontario setting, and the way Engel lets ordinary lives rub up against crime.
He did not stay in one lane. Engel also wrote historical and literary mysteries such as Murder in Montparnasse and Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, along with nonfiction books like Lord High Executioner and Crimes of Passion. Whatever the form, he kept coming back to motive, character, and the strange things people will do when fear, pride, greed, or love gets loose.
He also helped build a larger home for crime fiction in Canada. In 1982, he was one of the founders of Crime Writers of Canada, and over the years he received major honors, including the Arthur Ellis Award and appointment to the Order of Canada.
Then, in 2001, everything changed. Engel had a stroke that left him with alexia sine agraphia, a rare condition that meant he could still write but could no longer read in any normal way. For someone whose life had been built around books, it was a brutal turn.
But he kept going.
He worked through rehab, found painstaking new ways to manage language, and turned the experience into art. In Memory Book, Benny Cooperman suffers a similar injury and has to rebuild his thinking from a hospital bed. In The Man Who Forgot How To Read, Engel told the story directly, with honesty, wit, and very little self-pity.
His personal life also crossed paths with Canadian literary life. He was married first to novelist Marian Engel, and later to novelist and editor Janet Hamilton. He spent much of his adult life in Toronto, where he kept writing and stayed part of the literary world for decades.
Howard Engel died in Toronto in 2019 at the age of 88. By then he had done something quietly lasting. He helped make room for a distinctly Canadian private eye, and after a devastating stroke, he still found his way back to the page.
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