This Thing of Darkness, by Barbara Fradkin, begins with the death by beating of an elderly man in a very unsavory part of Ottawa, an area that by day is home to tourist shops and the visitors to whom they cater and by night is the province of prostitutes, gangs and the homeless. Inspector Michael Green is called in, but as an administrator he has to leave the day-to-day running of the investigation to his new officer, Marie Claire Levesque. At first they think the man was one of the many unfortunates who frequented the area, but soon they learn that he was in fact a retired psychiatrist, well-respected and by no means on the skids. Why was he wandering around the Byward Market area at 3 in the morning, then? And who would want to beat him so savagely, especially as he was a fairly frail old man? Green and Levesque have differing opinions about the answers to those questions, but they must somehow work together to solve the mystery before another innocent dies.... This is the seventh book in Fradkin's series featuring Inspector Green, but it's the first that I have read. I very much enjoyed it, although it was clear to me that I was missing some nuances because of having not read the earlier books first - in several places, Fradkin references the outcomes of incidents that must have appeared in the earlier novels and having no knowledge of those incidents hampered my enjoyment of the book at hand. However, that is of course my problem, not Fradkin's (and I'm resolving it by already buying the first two novels in the series in e-book form!). The characters are all well-drawn, with interesting backgrounds and interactions, and the murder suspects are thick on the ground and entirely plausible. Definitely worth a look! ( )

Retired psychiatrist Samuel Rosenthal is beaten to death late one Saturday night in an Ottawa alleyway. Officially the case is being investigated by Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque, new to the Ottawa Police, and she becomes convinced the doctor was killed as part of a mugging gone wrong. A group of black youths was spotted on a surveillance camera and Levesque spends her energies on tracking them down. Her boss, Inspector Michael Green, is not sure the case is as clear cut and he also starts to investigate the case, enjoying the feel of being back out in the field. He tackles several lines of enquiry including the notion that Rosenthal was killed by one of his former patients or possibly even his own estranged son. Green and Levesque disagree on process and priorities for most of the novel which impacts the investigative process at several points in the story.

I found this a fairly confusing book to read, with an over-abundance of plot lines that all received fairly cursory attention. For my enjoyment the book would have been better served by focusing more in-depth on a couple of these only, though I'm sure this is a matter of personal preference. An aspect that really grated on my nerves was the inclusion of the possibility that the motivation for the crime was one young Muslim man's extreme fundamentalism. There is absolutely no evidence of any such thing and the thread peters out into nothing at all, but that didn't stop Inspector Green throwing out a few random "facts" about Muslim extremism. The young man in question was born in Somalia and had experienced sustained violent abuse at the hands of a parent and the case does touch on the possibility that this upbringing had an unexpected impact on the boy but there was plenty of scope for this to be explored in more depth rather than yet another go-round of the ‘Muslim = terrorirst’ theme.. I can't even begin to imagine how truly awful it must be for the vast majority of Muslims who are perfectly normal, well-adjusted people to have their religion automatically linked with the notion of terrorism whenever it is mentioned.

This is the seventh book of the Inspector Green series and I did feel a bit like I was attending a party uninvited as there were a fair few oblique references to past events. That aside though the focus on the personal lives of the various members of the team was a stronger element of the novel, though I must admit to finding Green both unlikeable and not entirely convincing. At one point for example he his indirectly responsible for the death of an innocent young girl and is at least partially to blame for the heart attack of a colleague. He seems to shrug off both of these events with only the most cursory of nods to any emotional impact on himself and neither incident changes the man's behaviour at all. I found this a little hard to swallow.

In the end I suppose this was a perfectly serviceable police procedural but I didn't find anything in it that stood out our would make me want to read more of the series. I do appreciate this is probably at least partly a result of coming to the series so late but I do think a series should be able to be joined at any point in its progress. ( )

It's probably a bad sign when you hear about an interesting-sounding book, put it on the to-read list, eagerly snap it up later at the bookstore, then, when you're ready to read it a few months later, you read the back and think "Hmmm... this is less interesting than I thought it would be."

That is what happened with This Thing of Darkness. I was first interested by the setting (I have a soft spot for mysteries set in Ottawa) and the plot sounded okay when I first read about it. The cover also made the book look very intriguing. However, by the time I picked it up again and read the back, I realized that I would pretty much be reading only for the local colour, as the plot had lost a lot of its glimmer. Unfortunately, the local colour was not enough; I got cross with the endless repetitions of "Rideau Street" (where the crime occurred) right out of the gate, and the other place names only sporadically worked their magic. Add to this the fact that I am not enamoured of mysteries that begin with heartwarming family scenes instead of the actual crime, even if the crime is introduced fairly quickly, and one aspect of the characterization that I am pretty sure is just my pet peeve, and you have a book that I would not be recommending, certainly not as your starting point for this series. ( )

It's such a pleasure to read a good mystery set in my own city, Ottawa, where all the streets and landmarks are familiar. Barbara Fradkin has written another exciting and involving police procedural, writing with sympathy and understanding of groups such as the homeless and mentally ill, and the problems of Somalian youths involved in gangs. An excellent story, where all isn't as it first appears. ( )