Once Upon a Time

Once Upon A Time is the second in the Inspector Green series by Barbara Fradkin. When an old man dies in a hospital parking lot, apparently of hypothermia, the Ottawa authorities are content to declare it a "natural death" and to leave it at that. Something doesn't look right to Inspector Mike Green, however, and he decides to investigate on his own time, with the help of Sergeant Sullivan of course. Together, they learn some unsavory details about the dead man, but it's only when another old man disappears that they start realizing that the death was anything but natural, and the causes reach far back into another time and place: Poland in World War II, to be precise. And the most intimate secrets of that past return to haunt the show more present.... I started this series in the middle and went back to the beginning because I enjoyed it right away, even though Inspector Green is not the most pleasant of characters: he's moody, self-involved and selfish, to name a few reasons to dislike him. But he's also dogged, determined and gifted with an ability to follow his own leaps of intuition, so that the reader is fascinated by his methods of detection. I generally don't read stories (or watch films) dealing with the Holocaust; as a TA during my undergraduate years, I worked for a professor who taught a course on the subject and after screening "Night and Fog" a half dozen times and listening to the recollections of survivors a gazillion times as I laboriously transcribed them, I figured I've paid my dues. But I'm glad I read this one, because it shows that during that (or any) time, the motives of humans are far more complex than we often believe. Recommended. show less