Ron Corbett Books in Order

If you want dark northern mysteries: Ragged Lake → Cape Diamond → Mission Road
If you want Frank Yakabuski's earliest case: Muskie Falls → Ragged Lake → Cape Diamond
If you prefer undercover thrillers: The Sweet Goodbye → Cape Rage
If you want outdoorsy nonfiction first: The Last Guide → The Last Guide's Guide

Ron Corbett is an Ottawa writer through and through. He was born and raised in Canada’s capital, and he still lives there today. That local knowledge matters, because his books feel shaped by rivers, back roads, courtrooms, and cold northern towns rather than by postcard versions of them.

Before he turned to novels, Corbett spent years in journalism. He was a full-time columnist for both the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Sun, won two National Newspaper Awards, taught journalism at Carleton University, and later spent a decade in radio. He has said that all those years covering crime, courts, and human-interest stories gave him a deep store of scenes, voices, and hard facts that eventually found their way into fiction.

The move into books did not start with a detective. While working on a newspaper story, Corbett met Frank Kuiack, the last full-time fishing guide in Algonquin Park. That encounter led to The Last Guide, a Canadian bestseller that blends fishing, local history, and one man’s life, and later to The Last Guide's Guide. Those books show another side of Corbett’s work: his interest in working people, practical knowledge, and ways of life that are fading but not forgotten.

Then came fiction. His first novel, Ragged Lake, introduced Detective Frank Yakabuski and turned the northern woods into the stage for a brutal murder case. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, and it set the tone for later Yakabuski novels like Cape Diamond, Mission Road, Muskie Falls, and Back Channel. These are dark, physical mysteries where weather, distance, and old history matter almost as much as the crime itself.

He likes rough country.

Corbett’s other crime series follows Danny Barrett, an undercover FBI specialist sent into remote corners of the United States. In The Sweet Goodbye, Barrett heads into the North Maine Woods to investigate suspicious money and a deadly timber business. In Cape Rage, he moves to the Pacific Northwest and into the orbit of a smuggling family with enemies on every side. Readers who like these books usually point to the same things: strong setting, hard choices, wounded people, and crime stories that move fast without losing the human part.

Even across very different books, some interests keep returning. Corbett writes about isolated communities, people who know the land better than the law does, families under strain, and the way old secrets keep pushing into the present. His nonfiction book First Soldiers Down, about Canada’s friendly-fire deaths in Afghanistan, comes from that same instinct to look closely at what violence does to ordinary lives.

He also cofounded Ottawa Press and Publishing with his wife, photojournalist Julie Oliver.

Corbett is the father of four and still writes in Ottawa, from a century-old house not far from a river. That feels about right. Whether he is writing about a detective on the Northern Divide, an undercover agent deep in the woods, or a fishing guide in Algonquin, his work keeps circling back to the same thing: place, and the people trying to make a life inside it.