Robert Rotenberg Books in Order

If you want the series from the beginning: Old City Hall → The Guilty Plea → Stray Bullets
If you want Ari Greene in crisis: Stranglehold → Heart of the City
If you want a big Toronto social thriller: Downfall
If you want the broadest family mystery: What We Buried

Robert Rotenberg was born and raised in Toronto, in a house full of readers and storytellers. He started writing young, read whatever was around him, and by his teens was already sending stories out into the world. Long before the courtroom and the crime novels, he was simply a kid who wanted to make things up on the page.

That started early.

After studying English literature at the University of Toronto, he took a year off, drove a cab, travelled around Europe, and tried to write a book. The travel part worked better than the book. Law school followed, along with graduate study in international law in London, but writing never really left him alone.

He spent part of the early 1980s in Paris as the managing editor of an English-language magazine, then came home and helped launch T.O. The Magazine of Toronto. He also worked in film and at CBC Radio. On paper those years look like detours. In practice, they gave him a close look at city life, deadlines, ego, bluffing, and the little details that make people believable.

Then adulthood got serious.

With a child on the way and money tight, Rotenberg returned to law and built a criminal defence practice in Toronto. He has said that on the first day he opened that practice, he also started writing his first novel. For years he wrote in the margins of family life and court life, often getting up at five in the morning and working before anyone else was awake.

For a long time, he was sure he did not want to write about lawyers. Then the chapter publishers liked best in his shelved first novel was the only one with a lawyer in it. The day he learned that book would not sell, he started Old City Hall.

That book, published in 2009, changed things. Old City Hall introduced readers to a Toronto murder case that looked simple until it very much wasn't, and it showed the kind of story Rotenberg does best, police work, courtroom pressure, family secrets, and a city that feels fully lived in. He followed it with The Guilty Plea and Stray Bullets, novels that turn seemingly straightforward crimes into messy investigations shaped by class, media, grief, and the law.

As the series grew, so did the reach of the stories. Heart of the City moves through development battles and corruption in a changing Toronto. Downfall takes on homelessness and the widening gap between rich and poor. What We Buried reaches back into wartime Italy and family history, showing that Rotenberg is just as interested in memory and inheritance as he is in solving the case. Across the books, readers tend to come for the suspense and stay for the people, especially the way guilt, loyalty, ambition, and fear keep colliding under pressure.

Toronto matters in all of this. Rotenberg has written about going back to real locations to check tiny details because he wants the city to feel true, right down to the sound of a ferry horn or the look of a station platform. That habit gives his fiction a grounded feel. Even when the plots get big, the streets, institutions, and neighbourhood tensions stay close at hand. He still lives and works in Toronto, continues to practise criminal law with his firm, and has also written for television, including episodes of Murdoch Mysteries. He has taught writing at Humber and now mentors private students. It took him a long time to arrive at the life he wanted, but he seems to have kept both halves of it, lawyer and novelist, fully alive.