Peggy Blair Books in Order

If you want the full Inspector Ramírez arc: The Beggar's Opera / Midnight in Havana → The Poisoned Pawn → Hungry Ghosts → Umbrella Man
If you want the clearest introduction to Havana and Ramírez: The Beggar's Opera / Midnight in Havana
If you want the strongest Cuba and Canada crossover: Hungry Ghosts → Umbrella Man
If you want the most overt thriller plot: Umbrella Man

Peggy Blair came to fiction after a long career in law, and that second act helps explain why her crime novels feel so grounded. Long before readers met Inspector Ricardo Ramírez in Havana, Blair had spent decades working in courtrooms, negotiations, tribunals, and hearings where the stakes were real and often painful. She writes like someone who knows how institutions work, and how badly they can fail.

She has said she grew up in an Air Force family and spent part of the 1960s in Metz, France, on a NATO base. Later she studied law in Alberta, and while in law school she worked as a Special Constable with the RCMP. She eventually added a master's degree and a doctorate in law from the University of Ottawa, building the academic side of a career that was already deeply practical.

Law was her first life.

For more than thirty years, Blair worked as a criminal defence lawyer, Crown prosecutor, and specialist in Indigenous legal issues. Much of that work was with First Nations. She also served as a policy adviser on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, sat on the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, and later heard Indian Residential Schools claims as a senior adjudicator. In the 1990s she was involved in major legal and negotiation work around Indigenous fishing rights, experience that sharpened her sense of conflict, power, and compromise.

The move into fiction came after that work caught up with her. Blair has said that years of hearing abuse claims left her emotionally spent, and when her daughter pushed her to do something new, the answer that came out was simple, she would write a book. She drafted The Beggar's Opera quickly, but getting it published was another story. The manuscript was rejected 156 times before it was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger in the UK, and a chance meeting with Ian Rankin helped move it toward publication.

Persistence became part of her origin story.

That debut, published in the UK as Midnight in Havana, introduced the series that most readers know her for. Inspector Ramírez is a Havana detective with a sharp mind, a strong moral core, and a troubling connection to the dead. Blair followed the first book with The Poisoned Pawn, Hungry Ghosts, and Umbrella Man, widening the series into Ottawa, Northern Ontario, and international intrigue. Readers tend to come for the mysteries and stay for the mix of Cuban atmosphere, dry humor, moral pressure, and characters who feel bruised but stubbornly human.

One thing readers often notice is that Blair never treats setting as wallpaper. Havana's shortages, heat, bureaucracy, and street life matter to the plot. So do Canadian spaces, especially Ottawa and Northern communities, where questions of history and belonging sit just below the surface. Even when the plots turn twisty, the books keep pulling back to the ordinary people caught in the machinery.

When later books ran into publishing resistance, Blair did not stop. She switched publishers for Hungry Ghosts and Umbrella Man, and later launched her own press after another mystery novel was turned down. That stubborn, practical streak feels very consistent with the rest of her career. She has spent a long time finding ways around closed doors.

Blair has also written nonfiction, including Lament for a First Nation, a book about the Williams Treaties and Indigenous hunting and fishing rights. Based in the Ottawa area, she has worked in real estate and founded ReBound Press. She has also described herself as a renovator, artist, and boxer, which sounds about right for a writer who clearly does not like staying in one lane.